Author Archives: surgeons of horror

Desire, Identity, and DIY Nightmares: The Serpent’s Skin (2025)

14 Thursday May 2026

Posted by in Movie review

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , ,

There is something undeniably fascinating about the emergence of Alice Maio Mackay as a modern underground horror voice.

In an era where independent genre cinema often bends toward algorithmic familiarity or nostalgia-driven imitation, Mackay’s work feels defiantly personal — rough around the edges, fiercely expressive, and deeply invested in stories of identity, transformation, queerness, alienation, and emotional vulnerability. Her films do not merely use horror as metaphor; they inhabit it as lived experience.

With The Serpent’s Skin, Mackay once again returns to those recurring thematic obsessions, crafting a supernatural relationship horror steeped in desire, insecurity, and bodily transformation. The result is a film bursting with sincerity and ambition, even if its execution occasionally struggles beneath the weight of its ideas.

Horror as Emotional Expression

At its core, The Serpent’s Skin is less concerned with demonic mythology than emotional rupture.

The narrative — centred on two young women whose growing romantic connection awakens supernatural powers and inadvertently unleashes a destructive evil — functions primarily as a framework for exploring intimacy, repression, guilt, and self-perception.

As with much of Mackay’s work, the horror emerges from emotional instability rather than external threat alone. The demon haunting the film feels symbolic of unresolved trauma and insecurity — a manifestation of emotional damage infecting the relationships around it.

This approach gives the film a deeply personal energy, even when its storytelling becomes uneven.

The Voice of Alice Maio Mackay

What continues to distinguish Alice Maio Mackay is the clarity of her voice.

Her cinema exists within a fascinating lineage of queer DIY horror filmmaking — openly embracing melodrama, camp, supernatural iconography, and emotional rawness while rejecting the polished sterility that often dominates contemporary independent horror.

There is an immediacy to her work that feels refreshingly unfiltered.

Mackay’s films frequently centre outsiders searching for identity and belonging within worlds that threaten to reject or consume them. In The Serpent’s Skin, desire itself becomes transformative and dangerous, blurring the boundaries between liberation and destruction.

The film understands that vulnerability can be terrifying.

Style Over Structure

Where The Serpent’s Skin falters somewhat is in its narrative cohesion.

The mythology surrounding the demon and supernatural powers often feels underdeveloped, with certain emotional and narrative beats arriving before the film has fully earned them. Tonal shifts occasionally create a sense of fragmentation, as though the film is torn between intimate character drama and heightened supernatural horror without fully reconciling the two.

Yet paradoxically, some of these imperfections also contribute to the film’s charm.

There is something admirable about a filmmaker prioritising emotional honesty and thematic expression over rigid structural precision. Mackay’s work rarely feels calculated. It feels instinctive — driven more by feeling than formula.

Bodies, Desire, and Transformation

Like much queer horror, The Serpent’s Skin uses supernatural transformation as a metaphor for internal change.

Desire leaves marks here — emotionally, psychologically, physically. Characters shift and unravel under the weight of longing, shame, and unresolved past trauma. The film repeatedly frames identity as fluid, unstable, and vulnerable to corruption, reflecting the anxieties tied to self-discovery and emotional dependence.

This thematic throughline proves far more compelling than the film’s literal mythology.

The true horror is not possession.
It is emotional exposure.

A Rising Cult Voice

Despite its flaws, The Serpent’s Skin reinforces why Mackay remains such an intriguing figure within contemporary independent horror.

She represents a generation of filmmakers reclaiming genre cinema as a space for deeply personal storytelling — unconcerned with mainstream expectations and more interested in emotional truth, queer identity, and artistic self-expression.

Not every experiment fully succeeds, but the sincerity behind the work is undeniable.

And increasingly, sincerity itself feels radical.

The Prognosis:

The Serpent’s Skin is an ambitious, emotionally charged supernatural horror film that further cements Alice Maio Mackay as one of underground horror’s most distinctive emerging voices.

Narratively uneven but thematically rich, the film thrives most when embracing its raw emotional vulnerability and DIY gothic sensibilities.

  • Saul Muerte

Innocence as Illusion: The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane (1976)

14 Thursday May 2026

Posted by in retrospective

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

,

There are films that disturb through spectacle… and then there are those that unsettle by quietly dismantling our assumptions. The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane, directed by Nicolas Gessner, belongs firmly in the latter category — a restrained, deeply disquieting chamber piece that cloaks transgression, autonomy, and moral ambiguity beneath the veneer of youthful innocence.

It is a film that asks a simple question:
What happens when a child refuses to be powerless?

Jodie Foster’s Controlled Enigma

At the centre of it all is Jodie Foster, delivering a performance of astonishing composure and intelligence. As Rynn Jacobs, Foster does not play vulnerability in the expected sense. Instead, she constructs a character defined by precision, self-possession, and emotional restraint.

Rynn is not naïve. She is observant, calculating, and acutely aware of the world’s intrusions. Foster imbues her with a stillness that is both captivating and unnerving — a young girl who speaks like an adult, thinks like a survivor, and reacts with a logic that feels… slightly off-centre.

It is this ambiguity that makes the performance so compelling.
We are never entirely sure whether to protect her… or fear her.

A House Built on Secrets

The film’s setting — a quiet New England home by the sea — becomes a space of both sanctuary and concealment. Gessner frames the house not as a place of comfort, but as a carefully maintained illusion, one that Rynn must constantly defend against outside intrusion.

That intrusion comes in the form of neighbours who cannot accept what they do not understand.

The narrative tension is not driven by overt horror, but by social pressure — the creeping insistence that something is “wrong,” that the natural order has been disrupted, and must be corrected.

Martin Sheen and the Face of Entitlement

Enter Martin Sheen as Frank Hallet — a character who embodies a far more recognisable form of menace.

Sheen’s performance is quietly repellent. Frank is not a monster in the traditional sense; he is something far more insidious — entitled, invasive, and disturbingly comfortable in his own predatory behaviour. His interactions with Rynn carry an undercurrent of unease that the film never overstates, but never allows us to ignore.

In many ways, Frank represents the true horror of the film:
the adult world’s assumption of control over the young, the vulnerable, the different.

Childhood Without Safeguards

What makes The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane so controversial — and so enduring — is its refusal to frame childhood in sentimental terms.

Rynn exists outside the structures designed to contain and protect children. There are no parents, no guardians, no safety nets. What remains is a stark exploration of autonomy — and the lengths one might go to preserve it.

The film does not offer easy moral positioning. It does not condemn outright, nor does it fully endorse. Instead, it lingers in the uncomfortable space between justification and transgression.

Atmosphere of Quiet Dread

Gessner’s direction is deliberately restrained. There are no grand gestures, no overt shocks. The horror is psychological, cumulative, and deeply intimate.

Silences stretch. Conversations carry double meanings. The camera lingers just long enough to suggest that something is always being concealed.

It is a film that trusts its audience to feel the tension rather than be instructed by it.

A Study in Moral Ambiguity

Perhaps the film’s greatest strength lies in its ambiguity. Rynn is neither victim nor villain in any conventional sense. She is something more complex — a figure shaped by circumstance, responding with a logic that is both understandable and deeply unsettling.

The question is not whether her actions are right or wrong, but whether the world that forces those actions is any less culpable.

The Prognosis:

The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane is a haunting, quietly provocative exploration of autonomy, intrusion, and the fragile boundary between innocence and control.

Anchored by a remarkable performance from Jodie Foster and an unsettling turn from Martin Sheen, it remains a film that lingers — not through shock, but through implication.

A chillingly composed study of a child who refuses to be contained, and the world that cannot accept her independence.

  • Saul Muerte

The Lost Decade Reclaimed: In Search of Darkness: 1990–1994

13 Wednesday May 2026

Posted by in Uncategorized

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , ,

For decades, horror discourse has treated the 1990s as a wasteland.

A strange cultural dead zone wedged awkwardly between the blood-soaked excess of the 1980s and the postmodern self-awareness ignited by Scream. Conventional wisdom has long suggested the genre lost itself during the early half of the decade — caught between fading slasher formulas, shifting audience tastes, and an industry uncertain how to evolve.

But In Search of Darkness: 1990-1994 arrives not simply to celebrate the era, but to challenge that narrative entirely.

Over the course of its sprawling six-hour runtime, the documentary reframes the early ‘90s not as horror’s creative collapse, but as one of its most fascinating transitional periods — a fragmented, experimental stretch where filmmakers pushed the genre inward, toward psychology, existentialism, body horror, and metafiction.

This was not horror dying.
It was horror mutating.

Horror Between Two Worlds

The early ‘90s existed in the shadow of exhaustion. The slasher boom had burnt itself out, practical effects-driven creature features were becoming financially risky, and mainstream studios increasingly struggled to market horror outside familiar formulas.

What emerged instead was something stranger and more intimate.

The films explored throughout In Search of Darkness: 1990-1994 reveal a genre wrestling with identity itself. Many of these works are steeped in paranoia, decay, and fractured realities — reflecting both the cultural anxieties of the era and horror cinema’s own uncertainty about its future.

And that uncertainty became fertile ground for experimentation.

The Hidden Gems of the Forgotten Era

One of the documentary’s greatest strengths is its excavation of films too often overshadowed by louder genre landmarks.

The Exorcist III emerges as a perfect example — a film long buried beneath the legacy of its predecessor, yet now increasingly recognised as one of the most unnerving studio horrors of its decade. Its procedural structure and existential despair transformed demonic horror into something mournful and deeply human.

Likewise, Nightbreed stands as a fascinating reclamation project. Once misunderstood and butchered by studio interference, Clive Barker’s monster epic now feels radically ahead of its time — a queer-coded dark fantasy about outsiders, persecution, and identity.

The Rise of Psychological and Meta Horror

Perhaps the most fascinating thread running through the documentary is how many early ‘90s horror films became deeply self-reflective.

Wes Craven’s New Nightmare effectively dismantled and reconstructed slasher mythology years before Scream would popularise meta-horror. Meanwhile In the Mouth of Madness saw John Carpenter crafting an apocalyptic vision of fiction infecting reality itself — a cosmic nightmare about media consumption, authorship, and madness.

These were films no longer content with merely scaring audiences.
They wanted to interrogate horror itself.

Even The Dark Half and Body Snatchers channel anxieties surrounding fractured identity, distrust, and societal collapse. Horror had become increasingly psychological, reflecting a world entering the uncertainties of a new decade.

Body Horror, Flesh, and Mutation

Return of the Living Dead 3 transformed zombie horror into tragic body mutilation romance. Body Melt — an especially welcome inclusion given its Australian cult status — weaponised suburban satire through spectacular biological collapse, feeling like a sunburnt cousin to the work of David Cronenberg.

Then there is Cronos, where Guillermo del Toro quietly announced himself as a visionary auteur by transforming vampirism into a meditation on mortality, obsession, and innocence corrupted.

These films understood that horror’s true battleground is often the body itself — unstable, vulnerable, constantly changing.

Anthologies, Gothicism, and Lovecraftian Shadows

Two Evil Eyes united George A. Romero and Dario Argento under the banner of Edgar Allan Poe, while Necronomicon embraced anthology horror through a distinctly Lovecraftian lens.

Meanwhile, films like Dark Waters and Nadja leaned heavily into dreamlike gothic atmosphere, rejecting mainstream accessibility in favour of hypnotic art-horror abstraction.

This willingness to experiment visually and tonally is precisely what makes the period so fascinating in retrospect.

Horror Searching for Its Future

What In Search of Darkness: 1990-1994 ultimately captures so effectively is a genre caught in transition.

The documentary is less about nostalgia than reevaluation. Through interviews with genre icons including Heather Langenkamp, John Carpenter, Frank Henenlotter, Tim Balme, and Michael Gross, the film paints a portrait of horror cinema evolving in real time.

These weren’t safe studio products.
They were risks.
Mutations.
Experiments searching for new language.

And while not every film succeeded commercially, many of them now feel startlingly prophetic.

The Prognosis

In Search of Darkness: 1990-1994 is an absorbing, deeply affectionate reappraisal of one of horror cinema’s most misunderstood eras — a six-hour excavation of forgotten masterpieces, ambitious failures, and genre experimentation hiding in plain sight.

An essential viewing experience for horror devotees, and a powerful reminder that the early ‘90s were never horror’s lost years.

They were simply waiting to be rediscovered.

  • Saul Muerte

Devour Me Gently: Trouble Every Day (2001)

12 Tuesday May 2026

Posted by in retrospective

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , ,

There is a particular strain of horror that does not announce itself with shock, but instead seduces, suffocates, and lingers — a cinema of sensation rather than spectacle. Trouble Every Day, directed by Claire Denis, exists squarely within that space: an austere, unsettling meditation where erotic desire and bodily violence collapse into one another with unnerving intimacy.

This is not a film interested in monsters.
It is interested in what makes us monstrous.

On the surface, the premise is deceptively simple: a newlywed man travels to Paris seeking a cure for a mysterious affliction that manifests as an uncontrollable urge to consume human flesh. But Denis treats this not as a narrative engine, but as a philosophical framework.

The “disease” is less biological than symbolic — a manifestation of desire pushed beyond the limits of social acceptability. In Trouble Every Day, intimacy is no longer safe, no longer tender. It becomes invasive, devouring, terminal.

Love, in its most extreme form, is indistinguishable from annihilation.

Vincent Gallo’s Shane is repression incarnate — a man desperately attempting to contain something that cannot be contained. Gallo plays him with a fragile stillness, his restraint masking an internal rupture that threatens to surface at any moment. His performance is one of denial, of quiet panic, of a man clinging to the illusion of control.

In stark counterpoint, Béatrice Dalle’s Coré is pure surrender. She does not resist her impulses; she embodies them. Dalle’s performance is feral, hypnotic, and deeply tragic — a portrait of desire unbound, stripped of morality, and left to consume itself.

Together, they form a dialectic:
control versus collapse, repression versus release.

Denis approaches horror not through narrative escalation, but through texture, rhythm, and physicality. Her camera lingers on skin, on breath, on the fragile boundary between bodies. The violence, when it comes, is not abrupt but inevitable — an extension of the film’s sensual language rather than a rupture from it.

Dialogue is sparse. Explanation is minimal. What matters is the experience — the slow, creeping unease, the suffocating atmosphere, the sense that something is always just beneath the surface.

This is cinema that bypasses logic and goes straight for the nerve endings.

What makes Trouble Every Day so deeply unsettling is its refusal to separate sexuality from violence. The act of consumption becomes a grotesque analogue for intimacy — an expression of desire so intense it obliterates the object of affection.

It is, in essence, a film about the fear of closeness.

To touch is to risk losing control.
To desire is to risk destruction.

Denis does not moralise this impulse, nor does she sensationalise it. She simply presents it — raw, unfiltered, and deeply uncomfortable.

There is no denying that Trouble Every Day is a challenging watch. Its pacing is deliberate, its structure opaque, its intentions often elusive. For viewers seeking conventional horror beats, it may feel frustratingly distant.

But for those willing to engage on its terms, it reveals itself as something far more insidious: a film that seeps under the skin, leaving behind a residue of unease that is difficult to shake.

The Prognosis:

Trouble Every Day is a haunting exploration of desire, repression, and the fragile boundary between love and destruction — elevated by Claire Denis’s uncompromising vision and anchored by the contrasting performances of Vincent Gallo and Béatrice Dalle.

A hypnotic, deeply unsettling work that transforms intimacy into something terrifyingly corporeal.

  • Saul Muerte

Pranks, Possession and Missed Beats: Killer Party (1986)

09 Saturday May 2026

Posted by in retrospective

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

There’s a certain kind of ‘80s horror film that feels less like a singular vision and more like a collision of ideas thrown at the wall to see what sticks. Killer Party, directed by William Fruet, is very much one of those films — a tonal chimera that bounces between slasher, supernatural horror, musical absurdity, and campus comedy with reckless abandon.

Forty years on, it stands as a curious relic of a genre experimenting… and occasionally losing its footing.

April Fool’s Chaos

Set against the backdrop of April Fool’s Day — a favourite playground for horror — Killer Party leans into prank culture as both misdirection and narrative engine. Sorority sisters, an abandoned fraternity house, and a grisly hazing legend involving a guillotine: the ingredients are all there for something deliciously macabre.

But rather than sharpening these elements into a cohesive blade, the film opts for scattershot storytelling, introducing ideas only to abandon or underdevelop them moments later.

The result is less a slow-burn build and more a series of disconnected jolts.

A Film at War With Itself

What makes Killer Party fascinating — and frustrating — is its refusal to settle on a single identity.

It opens with an almost surreal musical sequence, pivots into teen comedy, flirts with slasher conventions, and then veers hard into supernatural possession. On paper, this genre-blending could feel anarchic and fun. In execution, it often feels like multiple films competing for dominance.

There are glimpses of personality here — moments where the film’s off-kilter tone becomes oddly charming — but they are fleeting.

More often, the tonal shifts undercut tension rather than enhance it.

Style Without Sustained Impact

Visually, the film carries that unmistakable mid-80s sheen — soft lighting, garish interiors, and a sense of artificiality that now plays as nostalgic rather than immersive.

The kills themselves arrive sporadically and without much escalation. There’s a sense that the film understands the mechanics of horror, but lacks the discipline to build momentum.

Even the central supernatural thread — arguably the film’s most interesting angle — feels undercooked, introduced with intrigue but never fully explored.

The Party That Never Peaks

At its core, Killer Party should be about release — the chaotic energy of a party spiralling into something sinister. But the film never quite captures that crescendo. Instead, it drifts, moving from set piece to set piece without the necessary connective tissue to make the experience feel cohesive.

It’s horror by obligation rather than design.

And yet… there’s something oddly watchable about it. Perhaps it’s the sheer unpredictability, or the sense that anything — however ill-advised — might happen next.

Legacy in the B-Movie Basement

Killer Party isn’t a classic, nor does it ever threaten to be. But it occupies a comfortable space in the B-movie basement of ‘80s horror, where ambition occasionally outpaces execution, and charm emerges in spite of — or perhaps because of — the chaos.

It’s the kind of film you revisit less for its quality and more for its curiosity factor.

The Prognosis:

Killer Party is an uneven, genre-hopping oddity that never quite finds its rhythm, but remains mildly entertaining in its unpredictability.

A messy mash-up of ideas that offers fleeting fun, even if the party never truly kicks into gear.

  • Saul Muerte

Spectacle of Madness: Bedlam (1946)

09 Saturday May 2026

Posted by in retrospective

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, ,

There is a peculiar tension at the heart of Bedlam — a film that aspires to moral outrage yet cannot fully escape the theatrical trappings of the very spectacle it critiques. Directed by Mark Robson and produced under the formidable shadow of Val Lewton, this late entry in the Lewton cycle arrives as both a historical drama and a psychological horror, probing the inhumanity of institutionalised cruelty in 18th-century London.

And yet, for all its ambition, it remains a work caught between message and melodrama.

A Theatre of Cruelty

Set within the infamous St. Mary’s of Bethlehem — the real-life asylum that gave us the word “Bedlam” — the film wastes little time establishing its central conceit: madness as entertainment.

Aristocrats wander the halls, observing patients as though they were exhibits. Suffering becomes spectacle. Humanity is stripped away in favour of voyeuristic indulgence.

It’s a powerful premise, and one that resonates even now — the idea that society often distances itself from suffering by reframing it as curiosity.

But the film’s execution, while earnest, occasionally leans too heavily into stage-bound dramatics, diluting the rawness of its critique.

Boris Karloff’s Commanding Presence

At the centre of this grotesque institution stands Boris Karloff, whose portrayal of the sadistic Master Sims is as measured as it is menacing.

Karloff does not resort to overt villainy. Instead, he embodies a bureaucratic cruelty — a man who justifies his actions through order, efficiency, and a chilling sense of entitlement. His performance is the film’s strongest asset, lending weight to a character who might otherwise drift into caricature.

Opposite him, Anna Lee’s Nell Bowen serves as the audience’s moral compass. Her descent from observer to victim provides the narrative’s emotional core, though the script affords her less complexity than the premise suggests.

Horror in Restraint

In keeping with Lewton’s ethos, Bedlam avoids explicit horror in favour of suggestion and atmosphere. Shadows loom. Silence lingers. The true terror lies not in what is shown, but in what is implied — the degradation, the neglect, the quiet despair of those confined within the asylum’s walls.

This restraint is admirable, but it also contributes to a certain emotional distance. The film gestures toward horror without fully immersing the audience in it.

Social Commentary vs. Narrative Momentum

Where Bedlam falters is in its pacing and structure. The film is more interested in presenting ideas than in driving a compelling narrative. Scenes often feel like tableaux — carefully composed, thematically rich, but lacking urgency.

The critique of class, power, and institutional abuse is clear, yet it unfolds in a manner that feels didactic rather than organic. The result is a film that engages the intellect more than the senses.

Legacy in the Lewton Canon

Within the broader context of Lewton’s productions, Bedlam occupies an interesting space. It is less overtly supernatural than its predecessors, more grounded in historical reality, and more explicitly concerned with social issues.

But in shedding the eerie ambiguity that defined earlier works, it also loses some of the haunting resonance that made them endure.

The Prognosis:

Bedlam is a thoughtful but uneven exploration of cruelty and spectacle — elevated by Boris Karloff’s performance yet constrained by its theatricality and measured approach.

An intriguing historical horror that raises important questions, even if it struggles to fully embody them.

  • Saul Muerte

Buried Deep: Hokum (2026)

08 Friday May 2026

Posted by in Movie review

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , ,

With Hokum, writer-director Damian McCarthy continues his ascent as one of contemporary horror’s most distinctive voices — a storyteller deeply attuned to atmosphere, folklore, and the psychological wounds that fester beneath grief.

Following the unnerving precision of his earlier work, McCarthy delivers perhaps his most accessible feature to date, but crucially, accessibility does not come at the expense of identity. Hokum still bears all the hallmarks of his cinema: oppressive mood, fractured psyches, dark humour, and mythology that feels less invented than unearthed.

This is horror that creeps rather than lunges.
A ghost story told through rot, memory, and rebirth.

The Inn as Psychological Mausoleum

The premise is deceptively intimate. Novelist Ohm Bauman retreats to a remote inn to scatter his parents’ ashes, only to become entangled in whispers surrounding a witch tied to the building’s infamous honeymoon suite.

But McCarthy understands that isolated settings are never merely locations. They are psychological extensions of the characters trapped within them.

The inn in Hokum becomes a liminal space suspended between mourning and transformation — a decaying threshold where unresolved trauma manifests through folklore and hallucination alike. Every creaking corridor and dimly lit room feels infected by memory.

The one-location approach works beautifully here, amplifying the claustrophobia while forcing the audience into the same suffocating emotional space as Ohm himself.

Folklore as Emotional Architecture

What separates McCarthy’s work from more conventional supernatural horror is the way he embeds folklore into the emotional core of his narratives.

The mythology in Hokum never feels expositional or over-explained. Instead, it exists like oral tradition — fragmented stories passed down, distorted through fear and repetition. The witch haunting the inn becomes less a singular entity and more a manifestation of communal grief and inherited guilt.

McCarthy understands an essential truth about folklore:
its power lies not in certainty, but in ambiguity.

The horror emerges from what cannot be fully understood.

Grief, Decay, and Rebirth

Beneath its supernatural framework, Hokum is fundamentally a film about grief — specifically the way grief reshapes identity.

Ohm’s journey is not simply about uncovering the inn’s secrets, but confronting the emotional debris left behind by loss. McCarthy explores mourning as something cyclical and transformative, where death inevitably gives rise to reinvention, however painful.

This theme of rebirth surfaces repeatedly through the film’s recurring rabbit iconography — creatures traditionally associated with fertility, resurrection, and transition between worlds. Here, the rabbit imagery becomes deeply uncanny, suggesting both vulnerability and metamorphosis.

It is one of the film’s most effective symbolic threads, quietly reinforcing the idea that trauma changes us into something new… whether we wish it to or not.

Humour in the Darkness

What makes Hokum particularly compelling is its willingness to puncture its own dread with moments of dry, almost uncomfortable black humour.

McCarthy has become increasingly adept at balancing tonal shifts without collapsing the atmosphere entirely. The humour here does not undercut the horror; it humanises it. It reminds us that absurdity often accompanies grief, that fear and laughter are not opposites but uneasy companions.

This tonal elasticity gives the film texture, preventing it from disappearing entirely into self-seriousness.

Damian McCarthy’s Rising Voice

With Hokum, McCarthy further establishes himself as part of a modern wave of horror filmmakers reclaiming atmosphere and folklore as vehicles for deeply personal storytelling.

There are traces of classic ghost stories here, certainly, but also something distinctly contemporary in the film’s focus on emotional inheritance and psychological fragmentation.

More importantly, McCarthy continues to trust the audience — resisting over-explanation in favour of mood, suggestion, and symbolism. In an era where many horror films feel compelled to spell out their mythology, Hokum allows mystery to remain unsettlingly intact.

The Prognosis:

Hokum is another strong entry in Damian McCarthy’s growing body of work — a haunting, folkloric meditation on grief, identity, and transformation wrapped inside an eerie one-location nightmare.

Atmospheric, psychologically rich horror that finds beauty in decay and terror in rebirth.

  • Saul Muerte

We Are the Weirdos, Mister: The Craft at 30

03 Sunday May 2026

Posted by in retrospective

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , ,

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

Posted by in retrospective

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, ,

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

Posted by in Uncategorized

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , ,

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