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I LOVE PARIS: Everybody Wants a Piece of You

01 Thursday Oct 2026

Posted by in Movie review, MonsterFest

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Vampires, vanity and the blood-soaked economics of becoming famous

The music industry has always been a vampire story.

Everybody wants something from you. Your voice. Your image. Your time. Your body. Your attention. Your followers. Your soul, if the contract is right.

Nicky Murphy’s I Love Paris simply has the good sense to stop pretending that metaphor is enough.

Shot through the deliberately grubby and voyeuristic lens of a mockumentary, I Love Paris follows Paris, an aspiring singer hustling through the Parisian music scene while chasing the increasingly elusive promise of fame. When a vampire attack unexpectedly interrupts her already precarious career trajectory, becoming undead proves to be less of a career-ending catastrophe than you might expect. In fact, immortality, nocturnal working hours and an endless appetite for blood may simply be another set of obstacles to negotiate on the road to stardom.

It is an inspired premise because Murphy understands that the vampire and the aspiring artist have considerably more in common than either might initially admit. Both are creatures of appetite. Both require an audience. Both survive by taking something from other people. Both can become objects of fascination while remaining fundamentally parasitic. And both eventually discover that the machinery which promises to elevate them can just as easily consume them.

The genius of I Love Paris is that it doesn’t hammer this metaphor into submission. Instead, it lets the absurdity of vampirism coexist with the mundane humiliations of trying to make it in the music business. Paris still needs recognition. She still needs contacts. She still needs someone to take her seriously. She still needs social media engagement. Becoming a blood-drinking immortal doesn’t magically make the gatekeepers disappear.

If anything, it gives her another fucking problem.

Murphy’s mockumentary approach is crucial to the film’s success. There is an immediate intimacy to the footage, as though we have stumbled into somebody else’s chaotic documentary about artistic ambition and simply forgotten to leave. The camera doesn’t stand outside Paris and judge her. It follows her. It watches her. It records the good, the bad, the embarrassing and the increasingly bloody.

That creates an uncomfortable relationship between subject and spectator.

At times, I Love Paris reminded me of Man Bites Dog, not because Murphy is attempting to replicate Rémy Belvaux, André Bonzel and Benoît Poelvoorde’s particular brand of cinematic provocation, but because the camera develops the same unsettling complicity with what it observes. We aren’t merely watching a dangerous situation unfold. We are watching people watch it unfold. And the longer the camera remains present, the more difficult it becomes to determine where documentation ends and exploitation begins.

That is where the film’s real fangs emerge.

Because how much are we willing to let go by in the name of entertainment?

How much cruelty becomes acceptable once there is a camera pointed at it?

How much exploitation are we prepared to forgive if the resulting footage is funny, shocking, fashionable or simply good art?

These aren’t abstract questions in I Love Paris. They are embedded in the very construction of the film. The camera is hungry. Paris is hungry. The music industry is hungry. The vampires are hungry.

Everybody wants a piece.

And somebody is going to get drained.

Aminata Thiboult is magnificent at the centre of this ecosystem. Paris is not constructed as some conventional tragic vampire figure, nor is she simply the naïve young artist who stumbles into darkness. She is ambitious, flawed, funny, occasionally infuriating and recognisably human. That humanity becomes particularly important once the supernatural enters the equation. Thiboult’s performance allows Paris to remain a person rather than becoming merely a vessel for the vampire gag. Her ambition survives the transformation. So does her ego. So does her desire to be seen.

Perhaps that is the real horror.

She hasn’t changed as much as she thinks she has.

Leonor Oberson is equally effective as Lutèce, the vampire responsible for bringing Paris into this nocturnal existence. Their relationship becomes one of the film’s richest sources of comedy and tension, because Lutèce is not simply an undead mentor handing down the sacred laws of vampirism. She is another complicated human being trapped inside a supernatural existence, and the relationship between the two women has the messy, affectionate and occasionally toxic quality of a friendship that has become impossible to categorise. An interview with Murphy, Thiboult and Oberson reveals that much of the film’s dialogue was developed through a mixture of scripted material and improvisation, with the performers translating and reshaping Murphy’s English-language scripts into something more naturally their own.

That authenticity is one of the film’s great assets.

Murphy allows Paris to feel inhabited rather than performed.

The streets feel lived in. The conversations have the looseness of people who know each other. The comedy doesn’t always announce itself as comedy. Sometimes it simply emerges from the collision between the utterly ridiculous and the completely ordinary.

And then there is the blood.

The vampire mythology is deliberately less interested in elaborate rules than in the practical inconvenience of being a creature that needs to feed. Murphy’s vampires don’t exist as some impossibly elegant aristocratic species floating above humanity. They are humans with an additional biological requirement.

They need blood.

Lots of it.

And if that sounds straightforward, try building a music career around it.

The result is a strange tonal balancing act. I Love Paris is funny without allowing its comedy to completely defang the horror. There are moments when the absurdity provokes laughter and moments when the laughter becomes slightly uncomfortable because the thing being laughed at is, objectively, horrible. That instability is important. The film understands that laughter and horror often occupy the same psychological space.

Sometimes we laugh because something is funny.

Sometimes we laugh because we don’t quite know what else to do.

And sometimes we laugh because the alternative is acknowledging that what we’re watching is genuinely disturbing.

Murphy’s direction allows these contradictions to breathe. The guerrilla-style production, shot on the streets of Paris with an extremely small footprint, could have produced something visually disposable. Instead, the limitations become part of the film’s aesthetic identity. The city doesn’t feel like a backdrop constructed for a vampire movie. It feels like Paris continuing to exist while these increasingly deranged people attempt to pursue their ambitions inside it.

That grounded reality is particularly important to Thiboult and Oberson’s performances. Their characters aren’t floating through some artificial vampire universe. They are negotiating relationships, artistic ambition, money, fame and survival within recognisable social spaces. The supernatural is therefore not an escape from reality. It becomes an exaggeration of it.

The vampire simply makes the exploitation harder to ignore.

This is where the film’s tension between greed and culture becomes particularly potent. Art is supposed to represent something beyond commerce, yet the music industry is an ecosystem built around selling identity. Paris wants to create. Other people want to package her. She wants to be heard. Other people want numbers. She wants artistic recognition. Other people want engagement.

And eventually the question becomes brutally simple:

Who is feeding on whom?

The answer, of course, is complicated.

The vampire feeds on the living.

The industry feeds on the artist.

The audience feeds on the spectacle.

And the filmmaker feeds the audience.

Suddenly that little mockumentary camera becomes considerably more sinister.

This is where I Love Paris earns its comparison with the voyeuristic discomfort of Man Bites Dog. The camera doesn’t merely record exploitation; its very presence raises the possibility that exploitation is the entertainment. We are watching Paris struggle, fail, scheme, bleed and feed because the film has invited us to watch.

We are not innocent observers.

We bought the ticket.

We pressed play.

We stayed.

And that makes the film’s questions about art considerably more interesting than a straightforward satire of the music industry. I Love Paris asks whether the audience itself is part of the ecosystem that creates these hungry creatures of celebrity.

Are we guilty of propelling the hungry hounds towards their glory, only to condemn them when they begin behaving like hungry hounds?

We want authenticity, but we also want spectacle.

We want artists to be vulnerable, but only in ways that entertain us.

We want to see behind the curtain, but rarely stop to ask whether the person standing behind it wanted the curtain removed.

And perhaps this is why the vampire is such a perfect metaphor for celebrity culture. The vampire is immortal because the audience refuses to let the image die. The celebrity survives through attention. Attention becomes currency. Currency becomes power. Power becomes appetite.

The cycle continues.

I Love Paris doesn’t need to lecture us about any of this. It simply puts the blood on the table and lets us decide whether we’re still hungry.

The film’s greatest achievement may ultimately be its ability to make Paris simultaneously ridiculous and sympathetic. She can be selfish. She can be vain. She can be frustrating. But she is also recognisable. Her hunger for success isn’t supernatural. It’s painfully human.

The vampire simply gives that hunger teeth.

Murphy’s film therefore becomes something considerably more interesting than a vampire comedy set against the music industry. It is a film about the performance of identity, the commodification of creativity and the uncomfortable relationship between artist and audience. It understands that the modern celebrity machine doesn’t necessarily need to destroy people outright.

Sometimes it simply keeps feeding.

And the people being fed upon keep smiling for the camera.

The Prognosis:

I Love Paris is a wonderfully strange hybrid: vampire movie, mockumentary, music-industry satire and uncomfortable exercise in cinematic voyeurism. Nicky Murphy’s direction finds considerable strength in allowing the natural elements of Paris, the performances and the improvised rhythms of everyday interaction to remain visible rather than burying them beneath excessive genre machinery.

Aminata Thiboult and Leonor Oberson give the film its grounded human pulse, creating characters whose relationships remain compelling even when the world around them becomes increasingly absurd. Their performances help ensure that the vampire mythology never overwhelms the film’s more interesting concerns: ambition, exploitation, artistic identity and the desperate hunger to be seen.

But perhaps the sharpest blade is directed back at us.

Because I Love Paris doesn’t simply ask what happens when a vampire enters the music industry.

It asks what happens when we keep watching.

When does fascination become voyeurism?

When does art become exploitation?

And how much blood are we prepared to overlook if the show is good enough?

The vampires may be hungry.

The industry may be hungry.

But the audience has been feeding them all along.

I LOVE PARIS screens at Monster Fest 2026 on Sunday 4 October at 5:00pm at Cinema Nova, Melbourne, following its Australian Premiere run after winning the Gold Audience Award for Best International Feature at Fantasia.

Come for the vampires.

Stay for the uncomfortable realisation that perhaps we’ve always been part of the feeding frenzy.

  • Saul Muerte

GODMOTHER: Welcome to the Desert, Where the Family Values Get Weird

30 Wednesday Sep 2026

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There are few things more suspicious in a horror film than the phrase “romantic getaway.” It is cinema’s way of placing a flashing neon sign above the protagonists and quietly informing the audience that somebody, somewhere, has made a terrible booking decision. In Godmother, that decision begins innocently enough: a couple head into the New Mexico desert hoping to escape the machinery of everyday life, only for their retreat to become considerably less intimate when Theo invites her heartbroken sister Katie along for the ride. Then the house itself starts introducing complications, and suddenly the idea of a relaxing weekend away begins to resemble the sort of holiday brochure that should come with a psychiatric warning.

Directed by John Veron in his feature debut and co-written with Alanah Pearce, Godmother initially plays its cards with a certain restraint. There is an appealingly awkward quality to the interpersonal dynamics, with relationships already carrying enough baggage before the supernatural—or whatever lurks at the edges of the story—has had an opportunity to unpack its own. That gives the film an important foundation. The horror doesn’t simply arrive from somewhere outside the characters; it grows out of the increasingly uncomfortable social space they have entered.

And then the temperature begins to rise.

This is where Godmother becomes considerably more interesting. Rather than detonating its entire arsenal at once, the film gradually turns the screws, allowing the atmosphere to curdle. What initially resembles an offbeat desert drama starts acquiring the peculiar logic of a nightmare in which every attempt to maintain normality only makes the situation stranger. The New Mexico landscape becomes more than picturesque backdrop. It is a pressure cooker—wide open, sun-blasted and seemingly offering nowhere useful to hide.

That gradual escalation is one of the film’s strengths. Godmother understands that horror can benefit from letting the audience sit in the wrong room for a little too long. There is something distinctly off about the experience: the sense that we have taken a perfectly ordinary road trip, missed the appropriate exit somewhere outside civilisation and are now following a road sign pointing towards a destination nobody remembers agreeing to visit.

The film is also blessed with the presence of two actors who bring considerable genre history into this increasingly strange equation. Dee Wallace has spent decades inhabiting the emotional architecture of horror, from The Howling and Cujo through E.T. and beyond, and she possesses the rare ability to make warmth and unease coexist within the same performance. Bruce Davison, meanwhile, carries his own formidable genre pedigree, having moved through everything from Willard to X-Men and The Lords of Salem. Their presence gives Godmother an intriguing generational dimension: this is a film featuring performers who know precisely how much menace can hide behind a seemingly ordinary smile.

Their roles work particularly well because the film doesn’t treat veteran genre performers as museum pieces. They aren’t simply here to give horror fans a knowing wink. Instead, Wallace and Davison become part of the machinery that allows Godmother to transition from uncomfortable social encounter into something considerably more sinister.

And that transition is where Alanah Pearce and John Veron’s collaboration becomes particularly noticeable. There is a creative curiosity running through the film—a willingness to let the premise become increasingly peculiar rather than constantly steering it back towards familiar genre territory. Pearce brings a background steeped in games, storytelling and popular culture, while Veron approaches the material as a filmmaker making his feature debut. The result is a film that feels interested in the possibilities of its own premise rather than simply ticking boxes on a horror checklist.

It also helps that Godmother understands the value of not immediately explaining everything. Horror is often at its most effective when the audience has enough information to become suspicious but not enough to feel entirely comfortable. The film plays with that uncertainty, allowing its characters to keep making decisions that seem reasonable right up until the moment they very clearly aren’t.

The desert is particularly useful territory for this kind of horror. It is the landscape of American mythology stripped of its reassuring edges: enormous distances, isolated properties, strange encounters and the persistent possibility that civilisation is considerably further away than you initially thought. It is also a perfect setting because the environment itself seems to encourage bad decisions. You can almost imagine the road disappearing behind you while some unseen voice in the passenger seat whispers, Keep driving. It’ll be fine.

It won’t be fine.

But Godmother doesn’t need to pretend that it is reinventing horror to be worthwhile. Its pleasures are found in the way it builds, the peculiarities it introduces along the way and the performances that give its increasingly bizarre circumstances a human centre. The film has an infectious willingness to push its premise further, and when it finally begins letting the horror properly off the leash, the earlier restraint pays dividends.

There is also something pleasingly old-fashioned about its construction. The film is interested in characters first, atmosphere second and outright mayhem somewhere further down the road. That makes the eventual escalation feel earned rather than simply inserted because the runtime has reached the point where somebody needs to start screaming.

For Monster Fest audiences, Godmother offers precisely the kind of festival experience that works best when you know as little as possible beforehand. It is an Australian Premiere with a strong creative partnership at its centre, a couple of veteran genre performers lurking within the cast, and a premise that becomes increasingly difficult to classify the further it travels from the romantic getaway advertised on the itinerary.

So pack the sunscreen, fill the tank and leave your better judgement at home.

The Prognosis:

Godmother is a steadily escalating horror film that finds its personality in the collision between uncomfortable domestic dynamics, desert isolation and increasingly strange genre territory. John Veron and Alanah Pearce have fashioned something that is happy to take the scenic route before driving directly into darker territory, while Dee Wallace and Bruce Davison provide welcome genre gravitas to a cast of characters whose weekend is about to become considerably less relaxing.

GODMOTHER screens as an Australian Premiere at Monster Fest 2026 on Saturday 3 October at Cinema Nova, Melbourne.

Monster Fest runs from 2–10 October, with the festival’s 2026 program presenting the film among its international and Australian genre premieres.

If you’re heading to Monster Fest, this is one desert getaway where I’d recommend checking the return journey before you leave.

  • Saul Muerte

Underground Horrors: Species

07 Monday Sep 2026

Posted by in Sydney Underground Film Festival

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There are few expressions more insidious than “the daily grind.”

It suggests something mundane. Something repetitive. A little unpleasant, perhaps, but ultimately survivable. Get up. Go to work. Put in the hours. Do it again tomorrow.

In Species, the daily grind becomes something considerably more literal.

Marion Le Corroller’s electrifying debut takes the familiar anxieties of professional burnout and pushes them through the meat grinder of body horror, imagining a generation so thoroughly consumed by work that exhaustion becomes a physical transformation.

Margot wants to be a doctor.

For an ambitious young intern working in one of France’s most competitive emergency rooms, however, the dream is rapidly becoming a nightmare. The pressure is relentless, the hours punishing and the stream of young patients arriving with mysterious symptoms linked to extreme burnout is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore.

Then Margot begins experiencing changes of her own.

The harder she works, the more her body begins to betray her.

It is an appropriately grotesque premise for a film about workplace exhaustion. Rather than depicting burnout as a vague psychological malaise, Species gives it flesh, blood and plenty of opportunities for it to tear itself apart.

Le Corroller is clearly interested in the traditions of body horror, but Species isn’t simply an exercise in mutation for mutation’s sake. The transformations are an extension of the film’s social commentary. Margot’s body becomes the ultimate workplace casualty — an organism pushed beyond its limits by a system that expects productivity regardless of the consequences.

The horror is that nobody seems particularly surprised.

There is something darkly comic in the way Species treats this environment. The absurdity of professional expectations gradually becomes indistinguishable from the grotesque. The emergency room is already a pressure cooker before Margot’s physical transformation begins, and the film finds humour in the bureaucratic machinery surrounding people who are quite literally falling apart.

It is social satire with a viscous coating.

Le Corroller also demonstrates a clear affection for practical effects. When Species gets its hands dirty, it doesn’t hold back. Flesh stretches, ruptures and mutates with the kind of tactile unpleasantness that reminds us why practical body horror remains so effective. There is an immediacy to seeing physical matter behave in ways it absolutely shouldn’t.

The influence of contemporary French body horror is certainly apparent. There are echoes of Titane in its collision of identity, flesh and societal expectation, while the workplace anxieties inevitably invite comparison with The Substance. Yet Species is less interested in abstraction than in taking a very recognisable contemporary problem — exhaustion — and asking what it might look like if we could actually see it happening to the human body.

The answer is not pretty.

Nor is it subtle.

But subtlety isn’t necessarily the point.

Species operates at the intersection of visceral horror and social satire, and its best moments understand that the two can amplify one another. The more grotesque Margot’s transformation becomes, the more ridiculous the expectations placed upon her begin to seem.

The film’s central conceit also taps into something particularly recognisable about contemporary working life: the idea that exhaustion is not necessarily regarded as a warning sign, but as evidence of commitment.

You’re tired?

Work harder.

You’re struggling?

Push through.

Your body is changing?

There are patients waiting.

It is here that Species finds its most uncomfortable joke. The system doesn’t necessarily need to destroy you deliberately. It simply needs to keep demanding more until there is nothing left to give.

And Margot is very much a product of that system.

Le Corroller’s direction is energetic and visually confident, particularly for a debut feature. There is an infectious willingness to push the material into increasingly strange territory, and the film’s mixture of blood-soaked practical effects, absurd humour and social commentary gives it an identity of its own.

At times, however, Species can feel as though it is operating at maximum intensity when a little restraint might have made its sharper ideas hit harder. Its satirical targets are rarely difficult to identify, and the film occasionally favours escalation over deeper exploration.

But there is something refreshing about a debut that would rather overreach than play it safe.

And Species certainly overreaches.

Thankfully, it does so with enthusiasm.

The result is an exhilarating piece of contemporary body horror that understands the grotesque potential of modern working life. Its monsters aren’t simply lurking in the shadows. They are sitting in fluorescent-lit offices, hospital corridors and examination rooms, smiling politely while asking you to work another shift.

Because that’s the real horror of the daily grind.

Eventually, something has to give.

In Species, it’s the flesh.

SUFF #20

Species screens Friday 11 September at 9:45pm in Cinema 1 as part of Sydney Underground Film Festival’s 20th anniversary program at Factory Theatre, Marrickville.

For more information and tickets, visit the Sydney Underground Film Festival.

  • Saul Muerte

Nightborn (2026): Mother Knows Best… But Does the Film?

31 Friday Jul 2026

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There are few fears more primal than the uncertainty of new parenthood.

The sleepless nights, the anxiety, the overwhelming sense of responsibility and the quiet terror that something might be wrong. Horror has long recognised the emotional potency of this vulnerability, from Rosemary’s Baby and The Babadook to more recent explorations of maternal dread. Nightborn enters this lineage with an intriguing premise and an evocative Finnish setting, but despite moments of genuine unease, it struggles to nurture its strongest ideas into something truly memorable.

Set deep within the forests of Finland, the film follows Saga (Seidi Haarla) and her husband Jon (Rupert Grint) as they return to Saga’s childhood home in the hope of beginning a new chapter. Following the birth of their son, however, Saga becomes convinced that something is deeply wrong with the child. Her growing paranoia places increasing strain on her marriage, leaving Jon caught between concern for his wife and disbelief in her increasingly desperate claims.

The film’s greatest strength lies in its atmosphere.

The Finnish wilderness provides an appropriately isolated backdrop, with dense forests and remote homesteads creating an ever-present sense of unease. Nature itself seems to watch the characters, quietly reinforcing the feeling that they have wandered into a place governed by older, darker traditions. The cinematography frequently favours silence over spectacle, allowing tension to accumulate rather than relying on conventional jump scares.

Seidi Haarla delivers a committed performance as Saga, convincingly balancing maternal instinct with psychological uncertainty. The audience is never entirely sure whether her fears stem from post-partum trauma or something genuinely supernatural, and Haarla handles this ambiguity with impressive restraint.

Rupert Grint, meanwhile, provides a grounded counterbalance. His Jon is less a sceptic than a man desperately trying to support his wife while struggling to understand what is happening around him. It’s a quietly sympathetic performance, even if the screenplay doesn’t always give him enough depth beyond that role.

Unfortunately, Nightborn never fully commits to the questions it raises.

The film repeatedly hints at fascinating ideas surrounding motherhood, inherited trauma, folklore and the fear of passing unseen burdens from one generation to the next. Yet rather than exploring these themes with confidence, it often retreats into familiar horror conventions. The psychological tension that proves so compelling in the opening act gradually gives way to narrative choices that feel more predictable than revelatory.

This uncertainty extends to the film’s identity.

At various points it wants to be folk horror, domestic drama, psychological thriller and supernatural mystery. Each approach contains promise, but they never quite coalesce into a satisfying whole. Rather than enriching one another, the competing tones dilute the impact of the central story.

There are moments where Nightborn genuinely unsettles. Its strongest sequences exploit the universal anxieties surrounding new parenthood with sensitivity and restraint, reminding us that horror needn’t always rely on monsters when fear already exists within the everyday experience of raising a child.

Ironically, those grounded moments prove more effective than the film’s supernatural ambitions.

As the mystery unfolds, many of the early ambiguities are exchanged for explanations that feel less compelling than the questions themselves. The result is a conclusion that lacks the emotional punch the opening acts seemed to promise.

That isn’t to say Nightborn is without merit. Its atmosphere remains consistently impressive, Haarla anchors the film with a compelling lead performance, and the Finnish landscape lends the production a distinctive visual identity rarely seen in contemporary horror. But strong atmosphere alone cannot compensate for a narrative that struggles to decide exactly what kind of horror story it wishes to tell.

The Prognosis:

Nightborn contains the ingredients for an unsettling exploration of maternal fear, grief and inherited darkness, yet never quite brings them together into a cohesive whole. While its performances and atmospheric setting provide plenty to admire, the film ultimately feels caught between psychological subtlety and supernatural convention, never fully embracing either.

Like the forests that surround its characters, Nightborn is rich with mystery and promise. It simply loses its way before reaching its destination.

  • Saul Muerte

Nigthborn is streaming on Shudder from Jul 31.

The Many Faces of Fear: Remembering Sam Neill (1948–2026)

14 Tuesday Jul 2026

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Some actors become horror icons because they wear the mask.

Others become icons because they become the monster.

Sam Neill achieved something far rarer.

He became the audience.

Throughout a career spanning more than five decades, Neill possessed an extraordinary ability to ground the unbelievable. He rarely played action heroes or larger-than-life figures. Instead, he portrayed ordinary men confronted by extraordinary horrors, inviting audiences to experience fear through his eyes. It was this gift—his effortless humanity—that made him one of horror cinema’s most quietly indispensable performers.

News of his passing at the age of 78 marks the loss of one of the screen’s most versatile actors. While mainstream audiences will forever remember him as Dr. Alan Grant in Jurassic Park, horror fans recognise a very different legacy—one built upon psychological collapse, cosmic terror, religious apocalypse and existential dread.

Few actors travelled through as many corners of the genre with such conviction.

The Face of the Antichrist

When Neill inherited the role of Damien Thorn in Omen III: The Final Conflict (1981), he faced an impossible challenge.

How do you follow one of horror’s greatest child villains?

Rather than attempting to imitate what had come before, Neill transformed Damien into something altogether more unsettling. Calm, articulate and utterly convinced of his divine purpose, his Antichrist never relied on theatrical villainy. Evil, in Neill’s hands, became sophisticated.

It was less frightening because of what Damien did.

It was frightening because of how completely he believed he was right.

Descending into Madness

If one performance defines Sam Neill’s relationship with horror, it is undoubtedly Possession (1981).

Opposite Isabelle Adjani’s astonishing portrayal of emotional disintegration, Neill charts an equally devastating psychological descent. Jealousy gives way to paranoia. Paranoia mutates into obsession. Eventually, reality itself begins to fracture.

Few actors have depicted emotional collapse with such raw vulnerability.

The horror of Possession lies not only in its infamous imagery but in Neill’s willingness to expose every insecurity, every fear and every contradiction within his character.

It remains one of cinema’s bravest performances.

The Horror of Knowing

By the time John Carpenter cast Neill in In the Mouth of Madness (1994), the actor had become uniquely suited to a particular kind of horror.

The horror of comprehension.

As insurance investigator John Trent, Neill doesn’t simply encounter cosmic terror.

He gradually understands it.

His performance captures the devastating realisation that knowledge itself can become a curse, echoing the works of H.P. Lovecraft where the greatest danger is not death but the collapse of certainty.

It remains one of the finest cinematic expressions of cosmic horror ever committed to film.

Beyond the Shadows

Even outside traditional horror, Neill continually found himself drawn towards stories exploring fear and survival.

The psychological tension of Dead Calm.

The hellish nightmare of Event Horizon.

Even Jurassic Park, at its heart, is a monster movie dressed as an adventure.

Across genres, Neill displayed remarkable consistency.

He never mocked the material.

He believed in it.

And because he believed…

We believed.

The Humanity of Fear

Perhaps that is Sam Neill’s greatest contribution to horror.

He reminded us that courage is rarely loud.

His characters were frightened.

They doubted themselves.

They made mistakes.

They suffered.

Yet they continued forward nonetheless.

In a genre often populated by heroes and monsters, Neill specialised in portraying people.

Real people.

That humanity transformed extraordinary horrors into deeply personal experiences.

A Lasting Legacy

There will undoubtedly be tributes celebrating Sam Neill’s extraordinary career.

They will speak of awards, acclaimed performances and blockbuster successes.

They should.

He earned every accolade.

But here at Surgeons of Horror, he will also be remembered as one of the genre’s great ambassadors.

An actor who never treated horror as a stepping stone.

An actor who understood that fear could reveal as much about the human condition as any drama.

An actor whose quiet sincerity elevated every nightmare he entered.

The monsters may have belonged to the stories.

But the humanity…

That always belonged to Sam Neill.

Rest in peace, Sam Neill (1948–2026)

Thank you for showing us that the most unforgettable performances are not always those of the hero or the villain, but of the person caught between them, trying to make sense of a world that suddenly no longer does.

  • Saul Muerte

It Will Find You (2026): A Supernatural Curse Rooted in Generational Trauma and First Nations Storytelling

02 Tuesday Jun 2026

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“Some things don’t stay buried. They wait.”

Horror has always thrived on inherited fear.

Curses passed from parent to child. Sins revisited across generations. Ancient evils clawing their way into the present through bloodlines unable to escape the past. Yet for all the genre’s fascination with ancestry and buried trauma, relatively few Australian horror films have explored those ideas through an authentically First Nations lens.

That is where It Will Find You finds its greatest strength.

Directed by Chris Broadbent and Enzo Tedeschi, this independent supernatural horror may operate within familiar genre frameworks, but it distinguishes itself through cultural specificity, emotional sincerity and a willingness to foreground Aboriginal storytelling rather than simply use it as aesthetic dressing.

The result is a film that occasionally shows the limitations of its budget yet consistently punches above its weight through atmosphere, mythology and heart.

The Horror of Inheritance

The story follows Emily, a young woman whose decision to move out of home inadvertently awakens a generational curse dormant for twenty-five years. As those around her begin dismissing her experiences as paranoia or psychological instability, Emily is forced to reconnect with her ancestry and confront the vengeful “giniirr” — a supernatural force demanding repayment for ancestral sins.

The premise itself is not radically new. Horror cinema has explored family curses countless times before. Yet It Will Find You succeeds because it roots those familiar ideas within cultural identity and intergenerational memory.

This is not simply a monster story.

It is a story about disconnection.

About fractured lineage.

About the danger of severing oneself from history and community.

The supernatural threat becomes inseparable from cultural trauma, giving the film emotional resonance beyond its scares.

A Powerful First Nations Voice

Perhaps the most refreshing aspect of It Will Find You is the way it foregrounds Aboriginal mythology without reducing it to exotic spectacle.

Too often genre cinema approaches Indigenous spirituality from the outside looking in, transforming sacred traditions into mysterious background texture for predominantly non-Indigenous narratives. Here, the mythology feels integrated into the emotional fabric of the story itself.

The film understands that horror works best when the supernatural carries symbolic weight.

The “giniirr” is frightening not merely because it stalks or kills, but because it represents unresolved history returning to demand acknowledgement. The curse operates almost as a manifestation of generational pain — something inherited, suppressed and ultimately impossible to ignore.

That thematic undercurrent gives the film surprising depth.

Kylah Day Holds the Centre

At the heart of the film is a compelling performance from Kylah Day.

Day carries much of the film’s emotional burden, grounding the supernatural chaos with vulnerability and determination. Emily’s fear feels genuine precisely because the performance never drifts into exaggerated horror theatrics. Instead, Day plays the role with an emotional realism that keeps the audience tethered to her experience even when the narrative veers into more familiar genre territory.

There is also something quietly powerful in the way the character’s journey mirrors the film’s broader thematic concerns. Emily is not merely fighting a monster; she is attempting to reclaim understanding of who she is and where she comes from.

That search for identity becomes the film’s true emotional engine.

Atmosphere Over Excess

Working with a clearly limited budget, Broadbent and Tedeschi wisely avoid overreaching.

Rather than relying heavily on visual effects spectacle, It Will Find You leans into atmosphere, tension and suggestion. Shadows linger longer than expected. Silence carries weight. The Australian landscape itself becomes part of the unease, simultaneously beautiful and isolating.

There are moments where the film’s ambitions visibly stretch against its financial constraints, particularly in some of the larger supernatural sequences. Yet there is also a sincerity to the filmmaking that compensates for those rough edges.

The directors understand mood.

More importantly, they understand restraint.

The horror often works best not when the film explains everything, but when it allows uncertainty and folklore to bleed together.

A Familiar Framework with a Distinct Identity

There are undeniably moments where It Will Find You falls into recognisable supernatural horror rhythms. Audiences familiar with modern possession and curse narratives may anticipate certain narrative turns before they arrive.

Yet dismissing the film on those grounds would overlook what makes it noteworthy.

Its identity.

Its perspective.

Its voice.

The film does not reinvent supernatural horror, but it does enrich it by telling a story rarely explored within mainstream Australian genre cinema. That alone gives it significance.

And when the emotional sincerity, strong central performance and cultural depth align, the film becomes genuinely affecting.

The Prognosis:

It Will Find You may not possess the polish or scale of larger studio horror productions, but its strengths lie elsewhere. Through committed performances, effective atmosphere and a powerful engagement with First Nations storytelling, the film transforms familiar supernatural ingredients into something culturally resonant and emotionally grounded.

A horror film shaped not simply by ghosts and curses, but by ancestry, memory and the lingering scars of inherited trauma.

Even when uneven, it remains compelling.

And in a genre landscape increasingly hungry for fresh voices and perspectives, that matters.

  • Saul Muerte

Buried Deep: Hokum (2026)

08 Friday May 2026

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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

Faith in the Fire: Heresy (2026)

29 Wednesday Apr 2026

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

The Weight of Belief

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

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

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

Folklore as Fear Language

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

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

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

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

Compression and Constraint

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

Yet this compression is both its strength and its limitation.

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

Aesthetic of Austerity

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

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

The Horror Within

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

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

The Prognosis:

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

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

  • Saul Muerte

Heresy Premieres Exclusively on Shudder and AMC+ Friday 1 May

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

27 Monday Apr 2026

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

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

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

The Crypt Keeper Cometh

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

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

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

EC Comics DNA: Morality With Bite

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

Bad people will suffer.
And they will suffer poetically.

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

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

A Playground for the Bold

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gore, Guts, and Glorious Excess

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

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

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

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

The Anthology That Shaped a Generation

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

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

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

Why It Still Matters

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • Saul Muerte

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

Blood in the Water: Killer Whale Goes for the Throat

17 Tuesday Feb 2026

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There’s an compelling idea lurking beneath Killer Whale: a trauma drama dressed up as a creature feature. Director Jo-Anne Brechin frames her survival thriller around grief, survivor’s guilt and damaged ambition, using the rampaging orca less as a monster and more as an externalisation of unresolved pain. It’s a thoughtful angle in theory — but one that struggles to stay afloat amid the film’s more formulaic genre trappings.

The story follows Maddie (Virginia Gardner), a gifted cellist whose life stalls after a violent robbery leaves her hearing impaired and her boyfriend dead. A year later, a guilt-ridden holiday to Thailand with her friend Trish (Mel Jarnson) spirals into nightmare territory when an abused captive orca is unleashed into a secluded lagoon. What begins as an emotional reckoning quickly pivots into familiar killer-creature beats: stranded swimmers, tightening geography, and a predator circling with mechanical persistence.

Brechin deserves credit for attempting to graft psychological weight onto a well-worn subgenre. The early passages, which explore Maddie’s fractured identity and her complicated relationship with sound and silence, hint at a more introspective film. Gardner carries these quieter moments with conviction, grounding the character’s grief in a way that feels authentic. Yet once the survival mechanics kick in, the emotional throughline becomes increasingly submerged beneath routine suspense staging.

Compared to the great killer-creature touchstones — from the elegant dread of Jaws to the lean efficiency of modern aquatic thrillers — Killer Whale feels caught between ambitions. The orca itself is an effective symbol of exploitation and rage, but the visual execution varies wildly, with tension undercut by uneven effects and repetitive attack rhythms. The lagoon setting promises claustrophobia but rarely capitalises on its full spatial potential, resulting in sequences that feel more cyclical than escalating.

What works best is the film’s thematic intent: the suggestion that trauma, like a wounded animal, will keep circling until confronted. What doesn’t is the script’s tendency to spell out these ideas while relying on stock genre decisions that blunt their impact. Characters make frustrating choices less out of psychological necessity than narrative convenience, and the pacing sags in a middle stretch that should be tightening the screws.

The Prognosis:

Killer Whale never entirely bores, and its central metaphor gives it a faint pulse beyond standard creature-feature thrills. But the disconnect between its emotional aspirations and its execution leaves it feeling like a sketch of a stronger film — one where trauma and terror might have truly reinforced each other, rather than competing for the spotlight.

  • Saul Muerte

Killer Whale will be available to rent on digital platforms from Feb 20.