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The Home (2025) — Senility, Surveillance, and the Long Memory of Evil

17 Wednesday Dec 2025

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James DeMonaco has always been fascinated by systems—how they rot, how they fail, and how violence seeps through their cracks. From the blunt social allegory of The Purge to the leaner, meaner contours of his later work, DeMonaco’s cinema operates in a state of controlled paranoia, convinced that institutions are not safeguards but incubators. The Home feels like a natural extension of that worldview, a film obsessed with corridors, rules, and the slow revelation that something malignant is being politely maintained behind closed doors.

The premise is deceptively modest. A troubled drifter takes a job at a retirement home. The residents are strange. The caretakers are stranger. The fourth floor is forbidden. This is familiar territory—The Home traffics in the grammar of institutional horror—but DeMonaco filters it through a jittery, conspiratorial lens. The building is less a location than a system of concealment, its bland hallways buzzing with the low-grade menace of withheld information. Every locked door feels like a threat. Every smile reads as camouflage.

The film’s manic energy is largely carried by Pete Davidson, whose casting initially seems like provocation but gradually reveals a sharp, unsettling logic. Davidson plays the protagonist as a man permanently braced for impact, his body language twitchy, his eyes scanning for exits that may or may not exist. He weaponises his familiar cadences—half-joking, half-defensive—until they curdle into something desperate. This is Davidson stripped of irony, and while the performance is uneven, it is never uninteresting. His character’s foster-care trauma bleeds into the film’s institutional dread, turning the retirement home into a warped echo of the systems that failed him as a child.

DeMonaco leans hard into paranoia, sometimes to the film’s benefit, sometimes to its detriment. The Home is thick with suggestion—rituals half-glimpsed, whispers behind doors, glances held a second too long—but it often mistakes accumulation for escalation. The mystery coils inward, doubling back on itself, feeding the sense that the protagonist may be uncovering a conspiracy or simply unraveling under its weight. The film wants to exist in that uncertainty, but its third act can’t quite resist explanation, flattening some of the unease it works so diligently to cultivate.

Visually, the film is austere and oppressive. The retirement home is rendered as a liminal space where time has curdled—neither alive nor dead, neither nurturing nor openly hostile. DeMonaco’s camera prowls rather than observes, peering down hallways like it expects to be noticed. The forbidden fourth floor looms as an almost abstract concept, a vertical metaphor for buried memory and institutional secrecy that the film circles obsessively.

Yet for all its ambition, The Home struggles to fully reconcile its ideas. The social commentary—about neglect, aging, and the expendability of those who fall through institutional cracks—is present but underdeveloped. DeMonaco gestures toward something corrosive and systemic, but the film’s manic intensity sometimes drowns out its own argument. What remains is a mood piece that crackles with unease but lacks the narrative clarity to make its paranoia feel truly revelatory.

The Home is not a failure so much as an overextended diagnosis. It captures the sensation of discovering that the rules you trusted were never meant to protect you, but it can’t quite land the final indictment. Still, in its jittery energy, uneasy performance, and claustrophobic design, it offers a compelling if flawed entry in DeMonaco’s ongoing exploration of American institutions as haunted houses.

The Prognosis:

A film that trembles with suspicion and half-remembered trauma—unnerving in the moment, frustrating in retrospect, and never entirely at ease with its own revelations.

  • Saul Muerte

Wolf Blood (1925) — A Century Later, Still Howling for a Pulse

15 Monday Dec 2025

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One hundred years on, Wolf Blood remains less a horror film than a cinematic curiosity—an early brush with werewolf mythology that never commits to being a werewolf film, a thriller without thrills, and a relic overshadowed entirely by the genre giants that defined its era. Released in 1925, it limps into its centenary not as a pioneering milestone but as an instructive footnote in what not to do with burgeoning horror iconography.

It’s almost unfair, at first glance, to compare Wolf Blood to Nosferatu (1922) and The Phantom of the Opera (1925)—but the comparison is inescapable. Murnau’s Nosferatu was already reshaping cinematic language, introducing expressionist shadows and spectral dread that embedded itself into the DNA of screen horror. Phantom, released the same year as Wolf Blood, showcased the artistry of Universal’s early macabre sensibilities, anchored by Lon Chaney’s transformative terror and lavish Gothic production design.

Wolf Blood, by contrast, feels timid and strangely uninterested in horror altogether. Where Nosferatu stalked its audience with plague-ridden menace, and Phantom delivered operatic Gothic spectacle, Wolf Blood spends a remarkable portion of its runtime on logging-camp melodrama, business rivalries, and a love triangle so tame it seems allergic to narrative urgency. The title promises lycanthropy; what it delivers is a medical transfusion and a man convinced—psychologically, never literally—that he may be turning into a wolf. No transformation, no bite, no curse. The supernatural is purely theoretical, and the film leans on dream sequences instead of embracing the monstrous.

In the 1920s, horror cinema was still defining its parameters, testing the boundaries of what images could frighten or disturb. Wolf Blood could have been part of that formative experimentation. Instead, it skirts away from genre entirely. Its werewolf premise is never realised; its mood never crosses into the uncanny; and its execution—flat staging, wandering pacing, and little sense of atmospheric danger—renders it a film that neither innovates nor entertains.

Even as proto-werewolf cinema, it is overshadowed by later, more robust entries (Werewolf of London in 1935 and The Wolf Man in 1941), which would properly codify the mythos that Wolf Blood only half-heartedly gestures toward. Its legacy, such as it is, lies in being technically the first feature to reference a form of lycanthropy—though even that badge comes with an asterisk, given that nothing resembling a werewolf appears on screen.

As a centenary artefact, Wolf Blood is valuable mostly in contrast. It reveals how essential atmosphere, visual imagination, and narrative conviction were to early horror’s development—and how barren a horror film becomes without them. While its contemporaries still throb with cinematic life, Wolf Blood feels anaemic, drained of tension and lacking both bite and bark. Forgotten by audiences and film history alike, it stands today as a reminder that not every first is foundational, and not every early effort deserves resurrection.

  • Saul Muerte

Beast of War (2025) — Sharks, Sweat, and Survival at the Edge of Roache-Turner’s Cinema

15 Monday Dec 2025

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Kiah Roache-Turner has never been subtle. From the splatter-punk bravado of Wyrmwood to the steel-jawed siege mentality of Nekrotronic and Wyrmwood: Apocalypse, his films have been fueled by testosterone, gallows humour, and a gleeful refusal to apologise for excess. Beast of War doesn’t abandon that DNA—it just throws it into the open ocean and strips it back to muscle, salt, and desperation.

Set during World War II, the film strands a group of young Australian soldiers on a shrinking raft in the Timor Sea after their boat goes down. There’s no grand campaign, no strategic victory to be won—just survival. The enemy comes in familiar forms: hunger, exposure, paranoia, and the creeping inevitability of death. Then there’s the shark. Big. Hungry. Patient. Circling like a debt that always comes due.

Roache-Turner approaches the material with the same bruised knuckles and dark grin that have defined his career. This is still a male, sweat-soaked pressure cooker of a film—men snapping at one another, egos flaring, leadership eroding under the sun. But where Wyrmwood leaned into anarchic mayhem, Beast of War opts for attrition. The humour is still there, sharp and irreverent, often surfacing in moments of grim resignation rather than punchline gags. A joke muttered through cracked lips. A laugh that dies halfway out of the mouth.

Visually, the film punches well above its weight. The cinematography makes art out of scarcity: endless blue horizons that feel less like freedom and more like a prison, sun-bleached skin rendered almost raw, the raft shrinking not just physically but psychologically. The production design understands that less is more—the sea doesn’t need dressing, and the raft becomes both stage and coffin. For a low-budget production, Beast of War carries itself with remarkable confidence.

The shadow of Jaws looms large, and Roache-Turner doesn’t pretend otherwise. The shark is used sparingly, often implied rather than shown, its presence felt through ripples, shadows, and the soldiers’ growing dread. More telling is the film’s spiritual debt to Quint’s USS Indianapolis monologue—men trapped in open water, slowly realising the ocean doesn’t care about bravery or patriotism. Survival isn’t heroic. It’s ugly. It’s luck and endurance and the will to keep breathing one more minute than the bloke next to you.

Where Beast of War occasionally stumbles is in its character depth. The soldiers are broadly sketched—archetypes rather than fully formed men—and while that serves the film’s hard-boiled tone, it limits its emotional reach. When tempers flare or bodies slip beneath the water, the impact is felt more viscerally than personally. It’s effective, but not devastating.

Still, as a continuation of Roache-Turner’s career, Beast of War feels like a natural evolution. It tempers his bombast without sanding down his instincts, trading chainsaws and zombies for saltwater and teeth, while retaining the same irreverent edge. It’s a lean, muscular survival thriller that knows exactly what it is and never pretends to be more.

The Prognosis:

Beast of War isn’t about winning. It’s about lasting. About men pushed past bravado into something rawer and quieter. A gritty, blood-in-the-water chapter in Kiah Roache-Turner’s ongoing fascination with endurance, masculinity, and monsters—human and otherwise.

  • Saul Muerte

Shelby Oaks (2025) — When Found Footage Loses the Plot

14 Sunday Dec 2025

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Shelby Oaks arrives carrying the weight of expectation that inevitably accompanies a passion project years in the making. Directed by Chris Stuckmann, the film positions itself at the crossroads of found-footage horror, investigative mystery, and internet-age urban legend—a convergence that has produced some of the genre’s most enduring works. Unfortunately, Shelby Oaks doesn’t synthesise these influences so much as stack them on top of one another, resulting in a film that is ambitious in intent but disastrously unfocused in execution.

The central hook is a familiar one: the disappearance of Riley Brennan and her sister’s increasingly obsessive attempt to uncover what happened. On paper, it’s a solid spine—personal stakes fused with creeping dread. In practice, the film never decides what kind of horror story it wants to tell. It borrows liberally from the breadcrumb-style investigation of The Blair Witch Project, the faux-documentary escalation of Lake Mungo, the cursed-media mythology of Sinister, and the online-conspiracy aesthetics of The Poughkeepsie Tapes. Rather than coalescing into something cohesive, these elements clash, constantly resetting the tone and momentum.

The found-footage framework, already a precarious format, becomes especially unwieldy here. The film toggles between mockumentary interviews, handheld investigation, archival clips, and conventional narrative scenes without any clear internal logic. What should feel immersive instead feels arbitrarily assembled, as though the film were endlessly re-editing itself in search of an identity it never quite finds. Tension dissipates not because the scares fail, but because the narrative keeps stopping to reinvent its own rules.

Worse still, the mystery at the film’s core grows less compelling the more it is elaborated. Each new revelation muddies the waters rather than deepening the dread, until the supernatural threat becomes a vaguely defined catch-all evil—more concept than presence. The obsession that should drive the story forward instead mirrors the film’s own fixation on referencing better works, mistaking accumulation for escalation.

To Stuckmann’s credit, Shelby Oaks is not without flashes of promise. A handful of isolated sequences suggest a filmmaker with a genuine affection for the genre and an understanding of its visual grammar. But affection alone is not authorship. Without discipline, restraint, or a unifying vision, the film collapses under the weight of its influences.

The Prognosis:

Shelby Oaks feels less like a horror film than a collage—an anxious attempt to be every successful found-footage mystery at once, and in doing so, failing to be anything at all. What begins as a missing-person story ends as a noisy, overextended hot mess, its sense of dread smothered by its own excess.

  • Saul Muerte

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

18 Tuesday Nov 2025

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

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

The Haunted House as Negative Space

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

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

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

The Strength and Strain of Minimalism

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

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

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

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

Indy, the Actor, and Indy, the Idea

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

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

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

Where the Film Lands: Devotion as Haunting

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

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

The Prognosis:

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

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

  • Saul Muerte

Good Boy streams on Shudder from Nov 21

Del Toro Reanimates a Classic — But Not Without Stitches Showing

15 Saturday Nov 2025

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Prognosis:

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

  • Saul Muerte

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

13 Thursday Nov 2025

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

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

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

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

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

The Prognosis:

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

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

  • Saul Muerte

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

12 Wednesday Nov 2025

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Prognosis:

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

  • Saul Muerte

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

11 Tuesday Nov 2025

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

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

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

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

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

The Prognosis:

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

  • Saul Muerte

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Possession Without Passion: The Missed Potential of An American Haunting

05 Wednesday Nov 2025

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“Possession knows no bounds,” the tagline warns, though sadly, the film’s imagination does. An American Haunting attempts to bring the notorious Bell Witch legend to cinematic life, boasting the acting pedigree of Donald Sutherland and Sissy Spacek, yet even their combined gravitas can’t save this otherwise weightless ghost story from dissipating into the fog.

Set in 19th-century Tennessee, the film follows the devout Bell family as they are tormented by an invisible force that grows increasingly violent. Courtney Solomon anchors the narrative in a quasi-historical framing device, flashing between the period setting and modern-day correspondences — a decision that feels more distracting than illuminating. The supposed authenticity of the haunting, drawn from one of America’s most enduring supernatural legends, is buried beneath layers of slick art direction and overwrought emotional manipulation.

There are moments where the film almost succeeds. Solomon’s use of stark winter landscapes and period detail captures a genuine sense of isolation and religious repression. The interplay between faith, guilt, and patriarchal authority hints at a deeper psychological reading — particularly in the film’s controversial subtext of abuse and repression. Yet these glimpses of ambition are undermined by generic jump scares and erratic pacing, reducing what might have been an eerie meditation on American folklore into a routine exercise in gothic excess.

Sutherland delivers a sturdy, if uninspired, performance as the tormented patriarch John Bell, while Spacek provides the emotional centre as the devout matriarch, stoic but visibly cracking under the strain. Their efforts, however, are let down by a screenplay that offers them little beyond reaction shots to unseen horrors. The younger cast members, including Rachel Hurd-Wood as daughter Betsy, fare better in the moments of pure terror — though even these are undercut by inconsistent visual effects and abrupt tonal shifts.

The film’s conclusion, which attempts to blend historical tragedy with supernatural justice, arrives with the subtlety of a hammer blow. What should feel revelatory instead plays as exploitative and confused, failing to commit to either psychological realism or full-blooded horror fantasy.

The Prognosis:

An American Haunting ultimately joins the long line of early-2000s supernatural thrillers that mistake gloss for gravitas. For all its promise of ancestral dread and spectral vengeance, what lingers isn’t fear, but fatigue — a ghost story that haunts itself with the shadow of what it could have been.

  • Saul Muerte