V/H/S/Halloween (2025): Analog Nightmares, Digital Fatigue

08 Wednesday Oct 2025

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Eight films in, and the V/H/S franchise has reached that strange liminal space between reinvention and redundancy. V/H/S/Halloween promises another grab bag of analog nightmares, but what it ultimately offers is a reminder that this format — and perhaps found footage itself — is struggling to justify its continued revival.

Segmented through Bryan M. Ferguson’s Diet Phantasma, a frame narrative about a possessed soft drink, the film pulses between absurdist body horror and tongue-in-cheek satire. It’s gory, chaotic, and knowingly silly — a kind of VHS-era Cronenberg-lite filtered through Slimehouse aesthetics. It’s amusing enough, but its placement between each short becomes little more than a sugar rush: a filler designed to jolt, not haunt.

Anna Zlokovic’s Coochie Coochie Coo aims for Barbarian-esque weirdness but collapses under its own shaky-cam chaos. It’s conceptually interesting — exploring the monstrous side of motherhood and lost innocence — yet the execution feels forced, desperate to shock rather than unsettle.

Paco Plaza’s Ut Supra Sic Infra is easily the standout. The [REC] director flexes his mastery of dread with a metaphysical descent into ritual horror and the supernatural. It’s slick, moody, and genuinely disorienting, proving that when the right filmmaker takes the reins, the V/H/S anthology format can still bite.

Casper Kelly’s Fun Size, however, is a regression — an infantile splatter piece that mistakes noise for novelty. Whether its deliberately bad performances are meant to parody ‘80s horror cheese or are just poorly handled is anyone’s guess, but it grates either way.

Alex Ross Perry’s Kidprint ends things on a troubling note, tackling child abduction and snuff imagery with an uneasy hand. The idea — a man unwittingly complicit in a ring of video-taped killings — could have been chilling, but the tone wobbles between exploitative and hollow. It’s a grim finish that leaves you numb rather than disturbed.

And that’s the core issue here: V/H/S/Halloween feels like it’s circling the drain of its own nostalgia. The analog grime, the static, the jittery cuts — once the aesthetic of underground menace — now play like ritualised pastiche. There are sparks of invention, but they’re buried under too many loud edits and too few genuine scares.

The Prognosis:

Maybe it’s time to admit what’s been lurking behind the flicker for years: the found footage format — once raw, immediate, and terrifying — is finally running out of tape.

  • Saul Muerte

The Drowned: A Mythic Thriller That Never Quite Breaks the Surface

08 Wednesday Oct 2025

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Greek myths meet murky waters in a low-budget thriller that almost makes it to shore.

Samuel Clemens’ The Drowned attempts to merge myth and morality within a low-budget psychological thriller, dipping into the murky waters of Greek legend to find something ancient beneath the surface. The results, however, are mixed—an ambitious premise buoyed by striking influences but ultimately weighed down by pacing and atmosphere that never fully submerge the viewer.

Drawing on the myth of Hylas and the nymphs—immortalised in John William Waterhouse’s 1896 oil painting—Clemens reimagines the seductive call of the sea as a modern-day reckoning for guilt and greed. Three thieves hole up in a seaside safehouse after stealing a priceless painting, only to find their fourth member missing and an ominous presence rising from the tide. The film’s mythological undercurrents give it a literary backbone, but they’re never quite fleshed out enough to transform into something transcendent.

There’s a palpable sense of ambition here: The Drowned tries to swim in deep waters, blending folklore, crime, and psychological tension. Yet much like the doomed figures in its inspiration, it finds itself lured by its own reflection—entranced by imagery but unable to escape the shallows of its limited scope.

Performances by Alan Calton, Lara Lemon, and Lily Catalifo lend the feature some stability, grounding its mythic aspirations in believable tension. The cinematography occasionally captures the desolate beauty of the coast with painterly intent, echoing Waterhouse’s haunting stillness. But the low budget is keenly felt, particularly in its uneven pacing and abrupt tonal shifts.

The Prognosis:

The Drowned deserves some credit for attempting to do more than most thrillers in its range—it’s an atmospheric, if uneven, meditation on temptation and consequence. Yet, despite its mythic intentions, it never quite earns its place among the more evocative modern fables. The sirens sing, but their song doesn’t linger.

  • Saul Muerte

House on Eden – Where Found Footage Finally Flatlines

03 Friday Oct 2025

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Kris Collins’ House on Eden feels like a film caught between admiration and imitation. On one hand, there’s a clear love for the stripped-down mechanics of low-budget horror — a small cast, a single creepy location, a reliance on atmosphere over spectacle. On the other, its DNA is so heavily indebted to The Blair Witch Project that it struggles to escape that long shadow, never quite finding its own voice in a subgenre that has already been mined for all it’s worth.

The setup is textbook found footage: paranormal investigators Kris, Celina, and their videographer Jay stumble into an abandoned house in the woods, where unsettling sounds, missing crew members, and unnerving presences steadily erode their sanity. To Collins’ credit, the film knows how to milk tension out of a flickering flashlight and a half-glimpsed shadow. There’s a genuine appreciation for the lo-fi aesthetic, which at times gives the film a scrappy, grassroots charm.

But charm isn’t enough when the beats feel so familiar. Every missing person, every static-laden frame, every anguished scream into the darkness calls back to 1999 — but without the raw novelty or cultural punch that made Blair Witch revolutionary. Instead of reinventing the formula, House on Eden seems content to echo it, and in doing so highlights just how stale the found footage format can feel in 2025.

The biggest frustration is that there are hints of potential. The lore surrounding the house suggests something ancient and malevolent, but the film barely scratches at it before retreating into shaky cam hysteria. A stronger commitment to its own mythology might have given it some distinction. Instead, what lingers is the sense of a genre on its last legs — a reminder that what once felt like the future of horror may finally be ready for burial.

The Prognosis:

House on Eden isn’t unwatchable, and diehard found footage fans may appreciate its sincerity. But for most, it lands as a pale reflection of a classic, underscoring that sometimes the scariest thing a horror movie can show us is that the format itself might be dead.

  • Saul Muerte

House on Eden is currently streaming on Shudder.

Roots of Guilt: Bark Ties a Man to His Own Demons in the Depths of the Forest

03 Friday Oct 2025

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The forest doesn’t care about you. It doesn’t care about your excuses, your regrets, your carefully constructed lies. Out there, among the trees, the world strips itself down to its bones — dirt, bark, roots, breath. That’s where Marc Schölermann drags us with Bark, a taut psychological thriller that ties both its protagonist and its audience to the raw elements of survival, guilt, and reckoning.

It begins with a man bound to a tree — a literal prisoner of nature and a figurative captive of his own sins. Charismatic Nolan Bentley wakes disoriented, tied down in the belly of a remote German forest. Enter the mysterious stranger, a figure both tormentor and liberator, whose taunting presence digs deeper than any rope ever could. The question isn’t just whether Bentley can escape. The question is whether he deserves to.

Bark is at its sharpest when it leans into this elemental battle: man vs. nature, man vs. stranger, man vs. himself. Schölermann uses the forest not as a backdrop but as a psychological weapon — the trees loom like silent judges, the soil feels heavy with secrets, and every snap of a branch echoes like a gavel slamming down in a cosmic courtroom.

At its core, the film isn’t about knots and ropes, it’s about consequences. You can’t disassociate from your own past forever; eventually the demons scratch their way through the bark and claw at your skin. Bark dramatises that inexorable truth with sweat, soil, and tension so tight it feels like the trees themselves are holding their breath.

The performances ground it — Bentley sells both desperation and denial, while the enigmatic outdoorsman needles and prods until every scab of guilt bursts open. And though the film runs its tension on a fairly narrow track, the payoff is a psychological unearthing that hits with the force of an axe to the trunk.

The Prognosis:

Bark is not just a thriller. It’s a meditation on accountability, guilt, and the way nature can strip us bare until we are nothing but the truth we tried to bury. Some secrets don’t stay hidden. Some forests don’t let you out.

  • Saul Muerte

Bark will screen as part of Dark Nights Film Fest on Fri 10 Oct at 7pm

Freddie Francis and a Star-Studded Descent into Victorian Horror

03 Friday Oct 2025

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A man of medicine… A pair of murderers… An unholy alliance.

By the mid-1980s, horror was dominated by slashers and supernatural spectacles, but The Doctor and the Devils offered something older, bloodier, and more rooted in history: a reimagining of the infamous Burke and Hare murders of 19th-century Edinburgh. Directed by veteran Freddie Francis, the film promised prestige horror, boasting a glittering cast and the bones of a Dylan Thomas script. Yet, for all its pedigree, it sits uneasily between period drama and gothic horror, never fully committing to either, and settling into a curious middle ground.

The story is well-worn: two unscrupulous grave robbers—here played by Jonathan Pryce and Stephen Rea—strike a deal with an ambitious anatomist, Dr. Thomas Rock (Timothy Dalton), who requires a steady supply of fresh cadavers for his medical research. Initially content with digging up the dead, the pair soon realise that creating their own corpses is a far quicker route to profit. The tale’s themes of science, morality, and exploitation are timeless, yet Francis’ film struggles to give them the bite they deserve.

What elevates the material is the cast. Dalton lends Rock a stern gravitas, a man torn between his lofty ideals and the sordid means that fuel them. Rea and Pryce inject menace and pathos into their criminals, turning what could have been caricatures into unsettling portraits of greed. Add to this the likes of Patrick Stewart, Julian Sands, and Twiggy, and The Doctor and the Devils becomes a veritable parade of British talent. The performances are sharp enough to carry the film through its slower patches, giving the gothic material a theatrical weight.

For Freddie Francis, this film represents a late chapter in a long and varied career. Having cemented himself in the 1960s and ’70s as both a director of Hammer horrors (The Evil of Frankenstein, The Creeping Flesh) and as one of Britain’s most celebrated cinematographers, Francis brought to The Doctor and the Devils a painterly eye. The cobblestone streets, shadow-draped laboratories, and candlelit taverns all bear his meticulous touch. Yet, as we’ve seen across his career, Francis was often at the mercy of the scripts handed to him. Here, despite the Dylan Thomas connection, the film leans too heavily on period trappings without fully exploiting the macabre potential of its subject matter.

The Prognosis:

In retrospect, The Doctor and the Devils stands as a respectable but flawed effort—a prestige horror that never quite finds the balance between gothic chills and dramatic weight. Its star-studded credits and Francis’ steady craftsmanship make it worthwhile, even if it lacks the raw energy or daring that might have elevated it into a classic.

  • Saul Muerte

From Crawl to Climax: Kiss of the Tarantula Finds Its Fangs in the Final Act

03 Friday Oct 2025

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So silent. So deadly. So final.

The mid-1970s horror market was awash with low-budget genre experiments, and Kiss of the Tarantula, directed by Chris Munger, fits neatly into that mould: a small-town thriller with a pulpy premise and an uneven execution. It’s a film that teeters on mediocrity for most of its runtime, but one that manages, almost unexpectedly, to crawl toward something far more compelling in its closing act.

The story follows Susan Bradley (Suzanna Ling), a troubled teenager whose closest companions are her pet tarantulas. Bullied, misunderstood, and scarred by childhood trauma, Susan turns her eight-legged friends into weapons, unleashing them on those who cross her. It’s a deliciously pulpy set-up—revenge served on a platter of fangs and venom—but the execution is too often sluggish, bogged down by pedestrian pacing and flat staging that sap the film of its potential bite.

For much of its runtime, Kiss of the Tarantula plays like a TV movie stretched too thin: the dialogue feels stilted, the performances serviceable but uninspired, and the horror largely tame. The spiders themselves are often more a novelty than a source of genuine terror, filmed with a kind of clumsy reverence that undercuts their menace. The film seems unsure whether it wants to be a serious psychological character study or a campy exploitation piece, leaving it stranded in the middle ground.

And yet, in its final act, something shifts. The atmosphere thickens, the tension sharpens, and the climax pays off with a burst of lurid energy that the preceding hour sorely lacked. Susan’s descent reaches a grim inevitability, and the film finally embraces its morbid premise with conviction. It doesn’t completely redeem the shortcomings, but it does leave the viewer with a stronger final impression than the slow middle stretch would suggest.

The Prognosis:

As a whole, Kiss of the Tarantula is far from a lost classic. It’s a curiosity, an example of 1970s regional horror that never quite capitalises on its deliciously twisted concept. Still, thanks to its striking finale, it avoids being dismissed outright. Mediocre for most of its length, lifted only at the end.

  • Saul Muerte

Detectives, Damnation, and Derrickson: Revisiting Hellraiser: Inferno

02 Thursday Oct 2025

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By the year 2000, the Hellraiser franchise had drifted far from its grisly, surreal origins under Clive Barker. What had once been a baroque tale of desire, pain, and cosmic horror had, by its fifth entry, morphed into something altogether more familiar: a standard-issue psychological thriller with the faintest whiff of Cenobite leather stitched across it. Scott Derrickson’s Hellraiser: Inferno epitomises this era of crowbarring unrelated stories into the franchise, taking what could have stood alone as a grim detective noir and grafting Pinhead and his puzzle box onto its framework.

The film follows Detective Joseph Thorne (Craig Sheffer), a morally compromised cop whose corruption and addictions lead him down a spiralling rabbit hole of violence, betrayal, and surreal torment. Along the way, he encounters the infamous Lament Configuration, unleashing the Cenobites. Or at least, in theory. In practice, Doug Bradley’s Pinhead barely registers, appearing only in fleeting, spectral cameos as though contractually obligated. It’s a curious bait-and-switch: marketed as a Hellraiser sequel, but functioning more as a hallucinatory morality play about guilt and punishment.

Craig Sheffer delivers a performance that is both strange and strangely compelling. His Thorne is less a hardened detective than a man visibly unraveling from frame one, his paranoia and sweaty desperation walking a fine line between over-the-top and hypnotic. His odd choices give the film its only real personality, even when the script veers into derivative territory.

For Scott Derrickson, Inferno marked his feature debut, and in hindsight, it reads like an intriguing blueprint. The seeds of his fascination with morality, spirituality, and personal damnation—later explored more successfully in The Exorcism of Emily Rose and Sinister—are all present here, though buried under the constraints of direct-to-video horror branding. His direction adds a layer of polish and atmosphere to what otherwise could have been disposable.

The Prognosis:

In the end, Hellraiser: Inferno is less a Hellraiser film than a late-night cable thriller wearing Cenobite skin. It embodies the era when Dimension Films would shoehorn iconic franchises into unrelated scripts, keeping names alive while draining them of identity. As such, it’s both frustrating and oddly fascinating—a film that feels at once forgettable and, in retrospect, a small but notable stepping stone for Derrickson.

  • Saul Muerte

Love Charms and Dark Curses: Black Magic (1975)

01 Wednesday Oct 2025

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Those who did not believe in the voodoo curse never lived to tell!

By the mid-1970s, Shaw Brothers Studios were in full bloom, their reputation cemented by lavish wuxia and martial arts spectacles. Yet with Black Magic, director Ho Meng-Hua pushed the studio into unexpected territory—an exotic, pulp-soaked world of curses, potions, and forbidden desire. What might have seemed a gamble became a commercial triumph, resonating with audiences in Hong Kong and unexpectedly finding intrigue in Western markets hungry for something stranger than the usual kung fu imports.

The story unfolds around Ku Feng’s sinister sorcerer, who profits by selling love spells to desperate clients. Lust, greed, and obsession feed his trade, until his desire for a young bride (Lily Li) destabilises the web of curses he has so carefully spun. What could have been a routine melodrama is transformed into a surreal morality play, where passions clash not just with human consequence but with the supernatural itself.

The film’s weird appeal lies in its intoxicating mixture: Shaw Brothers gloss and studio polish set against taboo subject matter. Rituals are staged with the same grandeur as sword fights, love charms replace blades, and sorcery duels play out with a theatricality bordering on the absurd. It’s trashy, yes, but also hypnotic. For Hong Kong audiences, it felt bold and fresh—an embrace of horror’s disreputable thrills wrapped in Shaw’s production values. For Western audiences, particularly those discovering the film in dubbed releases or grindhouse circuits, it was pure exploitation exotica, proof that Hong Kong cinema could deliver shocks and sleaze as effectively as any Italian giallo or American occult thriller.

Box office success ensured a sequel (Black Magic 2) and encouraged Shaw Brothers to explore horror more vigorously, ushering in a cycle of occult-driven films that blended melodrama with grotesque imagery. Ho Meng-Hua, more often associated with family-friendly fantasy, demonstrated here an unexpected flair for horror spectacle, one that has helped Black Magic endure as a cult favorite.

The Prognosis:

Today, it remains a fascinating hybrid: dated in some effects and drenched in melodrama, yet timeless in its commitment to lurid storytelling. More than just an oddity, Black Magic stands as a reminder of Shaw Brothers’ ability to adapt, innovate, and mesmerise across genres, captivating both local and international audiences with a tale of love, lust, and lethal sorcery.

  • Saul Muerte

Secrets in the Skyline: Revisiting Too Scared to Scream

27 Saturday Sep 2025

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There has to be a morning after, but only if you survive the night before.

In Tony Lo Bianco’s Too Scared to Scream, murder doesn’t stalk the shadows of New York’s back alleys but the plush hallways of an Upper East Side high-rise. This slick urban thriller unfolds as a whodunit, where every locked door hides a potential suspect, and the safe cocoon of luxury living is stripped away by a series of savage killings.

At the heart of the intrigue is Ian McShane, playing the building’s elevator operator, the son of the owner, and a man with a checkered past. McShane injects the role with that trademark quiet intensity—charismatic on the surface, but laced with unease. His very presence complicates the mystery: is he the keeper of secrets or the one making the walls run red? Watching him guide residents up and down the tower while their lives crumble gives the film its most potent metaphor—no one really knows where they’ll end up when the doors open.

Opposite him is Anne Archer, who gives the film its moral compass as an undercover detective posing as a tenant. Archer plays the role with intelligence and poise, blending seamlessly into the building’s social fabric while keeping her true agenda simmering beneath. Unlike the typical horror heroine, she’s not a passive target; her performance brings both authority and vulnerability, making her the strongest figure to root for as suspicion tightens around the residents.

The whodunit mechanics are the film’s most enticing asset: red herrings lurk in every corner, neighbours cast suspicious glances, and the looming question of “who’s next?” keeps the viewer guessing. Lo Bianco delivers some tense stalking sequences, but the film wavers between slasher conventions and mystery thriller aspirations, never fully committing to either. The finale, though effective enough, comes across as hurried, leaving the build-up stronger than the payoff.

As a relic of mid-1980s genre cinema, Too Scared to Scream straddles an awkward middle ground—too polished for grindhouse, too conventional for true noir. Yet McShane’s unpredictable performance and Archer’s grounded presence make it worth revisiting. They elevate the material, keeping the audience invested even when the script threatens to flatten into cliché.

The Prognosis:

Not a lost classic, but not without its charms, Too Scared to Scream is the kind of three-star curiosity that lingers in the mind: a high-rise mystery where the real suspense comes from watching two leads turn a middling thriller into something far more intriguing.

  • Saul Muerte

Beauty in the Bleak: Adorable Humans Pulls Humanity Inside-Out

26 Friday Sep 2025

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Forget bedtime stories. Forget the saccharine sugarcoating of fairy tales. Adorable Humans is Hans Christian Andersen after a month-long bender in a Copenhagen back alley, the ice of the north gnawing at his bones, the human condition revealed as cruel, horny, and violent. This is Denmark in its purest, most savage cinematic form — bleak, stylish, unnerving, and absolutely relentless.

Segment 1 – The Dead Man
We start in the graveyard of human decency. A corpse becomes the mirror to a living world rotten with selfishness, desire, and unspoken cruelties. The Dead Man doesn’t just speak to mortality; it shouts, spits, and bites at the audience. You feel the chill of decomposition on your skin as if the film itself exhumed something buried deep within your own psyche. It’s grotesque, funny, and tragic all at once — the kind of nightmare that curls around your ribs and refuses to let go.

Segment 2 – The Story of a Mother
Ah, grief incarnate. The Story of a Mother drags you through the sludge of loss and obsession, and if you’ve ever felt a parental instinct twist into something toxic, you’ll know the sensation in your gut: sharp, jagged, relentless. Here, Michael Kunov exposes the fragility of care, turning love into a vice, and mourning into a weapon. The camera lingers just long enough to make your soul ache and then jolts you with a cruel snap of reality — motherhood, possession, mortality, all tangled in a way that leaves you twitching long after the credits roll.

Segment 3 – The Snow Queen
Cold, ruthless, and merciless. The Snow Queen is Denmark’s answer to isolation, cruelty, and obsession, wrapped in a winter storm that gnashes its teeth. Kasper Juhl’s segment is a frozen fever dream where desire and danger swirl like snowflakes, blurring the line between predator and prey, hero and victim. It’s a segment that literally chills your bones and reminds you that even beauty can be a weapon, even ice can burn, and the darkness outside is nothing compared to what lurks in the human heart.

Segment 4 – Aunty Toothache
If you thought the previous three segments were cruel, Michael Panduro shatters that illusion with Aunty Toothache. Here, domesticity turns monstrous, and familial bonds twist into chains of terror. The segment is absurd, grotesque, and horrifyingly human — a macabre carnival of psychological, physical, and sexual transgression. It’s the Danish version of biting the hand that feeds you, then discovering that the hand has teeth, claws, and a very bad attitude. You laugh, you recoil, and you realize the joke is on all of us.

The Prognosis:

Collectively, Adorable Humans doesn’t just tell stories; it gnaws at your sanity. It’s an anthology of darkness, human frailty, and twisted morality, each segment a scalpel dissecting the uncomfortable truths of life, love, and the innate horror of being human. This isn’t polite horror. It’s not even Scandinavian noir in a friendly way. It’s pure, cold, dazzlingly executed dread. Beautifully shot, meticulously scored, and deeply, disturbingly Danish.

By the end, you’re left trembling, laughing nervously, and questioning the adjective “adorable” — because nothing about these humans is cute. They’re vicious, flawed, intoxicating, and unforgettable.

  • Saul Muerte

Adorable Humans will be screening as part of the Dark Nights Film Festival on Sunday 12th Oct at 5.15pm at The Ritz.