There are filmmakers who make films, and then there are filmmakers who seem to have wandered into a film laboratory, knocked over several shelves of chemicals and decided to see what happened.
Yoshihiro Nishimura was very much the latter.
With Geisha War, the Japanese cult filmmaker delivers one final eruption of blood, absurdity, political provocation and gloriously impractical visual effects. It is a film that frequently appears less interested in whether its story makes sense than in whether the next image can possibly be more outrageous than the last.
The answer, more often than not, is yes.
Set in the historic pleasure district of Yoshiwara, Geisha War pits an American gangster and his associates against the local community, led by Kiki, a ramen vendor who finds herself caught up in the struggle to protect the district from outside control. The basic premise provides Nishimura with an excuse to stage a collision between American gangster mythology, Japanese popular culture and his own particular brand of cinematic insanity.
And insanity is certainly the operative word.
Nishimura’s cinema has never been particularly interested in restraint. From Tokyo Gore Police to Helldriver, his films transform bodies into weapons, flesh into sculpture and practical effects into a kind of gleeful visual assault. Geisha War carries that tradition forward with an arsenal of bizarre weaponry, outrageous transformations and fountains of artificial blood. FilmInk describes the film’s visual approach as a combination of solid practical gore and cartoonish digital effects, with everything from chainsaw weaponry to giant scissors entering the fray.
It is less a film than a fever dream with a production budget.
Yet beneath the carnage is something considerably more pointed.
The conflict between Carmine and the residents of Yoshiwara is essentially a battle over cultural ownership. The American gangster sees the district as something to acquire, exploit and reshape for his own purposes. Nishimura responds by turning that clash into an exaggerated piece of exploitation spectacle, where cultural imperialism is answered with severed limbs, weaponised geisha and enough blood to repaint the streets.
Subtle it isn’t.
But subtlety was never particularly high on Nishimura’s list of priorities.
The film’s greatest strength is its willingness to embrace the ridiculous. A conventional action film might introduce a weapon and expect us to accept it as part of the world. Nishimura introduces something completely absurd and then seems determined to make it even more absurd. The result is a cinematic universe in which rickshaws become vehicles of lunacy, weapons emerge from unexpected places and characters can transform into things that would be difficult to describe without sounding like the result of a particularly feverish drinking session.
This is Gallows Horror stripped of the gallows and given a flamethrower.
There is also something strangely poignant about watching Geisha War as Nishimura’s final film. The director died in May 2026, making this an unintentional farewell from one of Japanese genre cinema’s great visual anarchists.
It is certainly an appropriate final statement.
Nishimura never seemed particularly interested in behaving himself. His cinema was messy, confrontational, juvenile, political, horny, grotesque and frequently hilarious. He understood that practical effects could be more than technical achievements: they could be jokes, provocations and punctuation marks. A severed limb wasn’t merely a piece of gore. It was a punchline.
Geisha War occasionally struggles beneath the weight of its own excess. The narrative is skeletal, characterisation is largely functional and the film’s relentless barrage of ideas can become exhausting. For all the visual invention, there are moments when it feels as though Nishimura has several films fighting for space inside the same one.
But perhaps that is part of its charm.
This isn’t polished underground cinema. It isn’t attempting to disguise its seams or convince us that its world is realistic. It is handmade, excessive and proudly artificial. The practical effects have weight; the digital effects deliberately flirt with cartoonishness; the action seems designed around the question of what could possibly make an audience yell what the hell was that?
And then, just when the film seems incapable of slowing down, it finds an unexpectedly reflective note beneath all the bloodshed.
That contradiction is what makes Geisha War work.
For all its ridiculousness, there is a genuine sense of resistance running through the film. Its grotesque spectacle becomes a weapon against the forces attempting to commodify and control its world. Nishimura takes the familiar machinery of exploitation cinema and turns it back upon itself, producing something that is simultaneously crude, playful and politically mischievous.
It is not his most accomplished film.
It may not even be his most outrageous.
But it is unmistakably his.
And as the final film from a director who spent decades proving that there was still room for strange, handmade, bloody and completely unclassifiable cinema, Geisha War makes for one hell of a final curtain call.
Underground Horrors is a series of reviews exploring the strange, confrontational and boundary-pushing films emerging from the underground of contemporary horror cinema.
There is something wonderfully rebellious about a film that seems to have been assembled from equal parts heavy metal, grindhouse cinema, 1990s music videos and a complete disregard for good taste.
Donnie Hobbie’s Jump Scare is that film.
The feature debut from Hobbie follows the all-female metal band Jump Scare as they retreat to a remote cabin to work on their new album. It’s supposed to be an opportunity to escape the pressures of everyday life and find some creative inspiration.
Unfortunately, their neighbours are cannibals.
It is, admittedly, a familiar horror premise.
But Jump Scare has absolutely no interest in behaving like a familiar horror film.
Instead, Hobbie takes the cabin-in-the-woods template and runs it through a neon-soaked, blood-splattered analogue nightmare. The result is a deliberately scrappy collision of comedy, gore, animation, psychedelia and heavy metal attitude.
It looks like a horror movie that escaped from a late-night music-video block.
And that’s a compliment.
There is a tremendous amount of visual personality here. Grainy imagery, saturated colours, stylised lighting, graphic overlays, practical effects and bursts of animation give Jump Scare the feeling of something excavated from a particularly deranged corner of the VHS era.
The film wears its influences proudly.
There are obvious echoes of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, grindhouse cinema and the splatter-comedy tradition, but Hobbie isn’t particularly interested in disguising those influences. Jump Scare is closer to a mixtape than a traditional horror film: take something from here, something from there, turn the volume up and see what happens.
And, for considerable stretches, it is a hell of a lot of fun.
The band themselves are one of the film’s strongest assets. Their camaraderie gives the early sections a loose, lived-in quality, and the chemistry between the performers provides a welcome sense that these characters actually enjoy being around one another.
That matters.
Because once the cannibals arrive, the film could easily have become another disposable exercise in slaughterhouse horror.
Instead, the personalities keep it moving.
Hobbie also demonstrates an obvious affection for practical filmmaking. There is a joyous physicality to the violence, with blood, guts, creatures and assorted bodily misfortune given an appropriately handmade quality. Some of the effects are deliberately rough around the edges, but that imperfection is part of the film’s aesthetic.
Jump Scare isn’t trying to convince us that we’re watching reality.
It wants us to enjoy the artifice.
That gives the film a particularly punk-rock quality. It is less concerned with polish than with energy.
The problem is that energy can only carry a film so far.
At 102 minutes, Jump Scare occasionally feels as though it has run out of ideas before it has run out of runtime. The same jokes, stylistic flourishes and conversations can begin to repeat themselves, while the middle section lacks some of the momentum generated by the film’s opening.
There are moments when you can almost see the more tightly edited version of Jump Scare hiding inside the finished film.
And that’s frustrating because there is so much here to admire.
Hobbie clearly has an eye.
There are sequences that burst with invention, and the film’s visual confidence is remarkable for a feature debut. It understands that horror doesn’t always need to be dark, grim or self-serious. Sometimes it can be loud, colourful, stupid, funny and covered in blood.
In that sense, Jump Scare feels like something of a corrective to the more restrained tendencies of contemporary horror.
It wants to have fun.
Even when that fun becomes excessive.
The film also gets something right about its metal-band protagonists. Their world isn’t simply used as an excuse for a soundtrack. Music is woven into the film’s identity, with the aesthetic of heavy metal becoming part of its visual and comic language.
The result is less Texas Chain Saw filtered through a conventional horror-comedy structure than Texas Chain Saw dropped into a particularly unhinged music video.
And then somebody added puppets.
And animation.
And considerably more blood.
For all its rough edges, there is something admirable about a filmmaker arriving with this much personality. Jump Scare isn’t afraid to be ugly, ridiculous or excessive. It isn’t interested in sanding down its eccentricities in the pursuit of conventional genre polish.
Sometimes that works beautifully.
Sometimes it doesn’t.
But I’d take an occasionally overstuffed film with this much personality over something technically accomplished and completely anonymous.
Jump Scare doesn’t reinvent the cabin-in-the-woods horror movie.
It throws the old model into a blender, adds a metal soundtrack, pours in a bucket of fake blood and hits the switch.
The result is messy.
Loud.
Occasionally exhausting.
But undeniably alive.
SUFF #20
Jump Scare screens at 9:45pm on Friday 11 September in Cinema 2, with a second screening at 8:00pm on Saturday 12 September in Cinema 4, as part of Sydney Underground Film Festival #20 at Factory Theatre, Marrickville.
There are few things more immediately relatable than stepping on a rusty nail.
The sudden stab of pain. The instinctive inspection of the offending piece of metal. The brief mental calculation of just how bad this might be.
Then there is Carroll.
When Oliver Bernsen’s Bagworm introduces its protagonist, he is already a man seemingly determined to make his own life as unpleasant as possible. A sexually frustrated hammer salesman, conspiracy-minded malcontent and habitual misanthrope, Carroll has developed an elaborate worldview in which the world is broken, society is collapsing and everyone else seems to be conspiring against him.
Then he steps on a rusty nail.
It is, perhaps, the least surprising turning point in cinema history.
What follows is a grimy, grotesque and frequently darkly funny descent into paranoia, physical deterioration and self-destruction. Carroll’s body begins to break down, but so too does his already precarious grip on reality. The question becomes increasingly difficult to answer: is the world genuinely falling apart around him, or is Carroll simply becoming incapable of seeing anything beyond his own increasingly distorted perspective?
Bagworm is at its most effective when it refuses to provide an easy answer.
There is certainly a straightforward body-horror film lurking underneath all the grime. The rusty nail becomes the gateway to an infection that gradually consumes Carroll, providing Bernsen with ample opportunities for increasingly revolting practical effects. His deteriorating body becomes a physical manifestation of the rot already present in his life.
But the film isn’t really interested in asking whether Carroll is sick.
He’s obviously sick.
The more interesting question is whether the infection is responsible for his behaviour or merely giving physical form to everything that was already there.
Carroll is not an easy protagonist to spend ninety-six minutes with. That seems entirely deliberate.
He is petty, suspicious, angry and convinced of his own righteousness. His relationships with women, friends and strangers become increasingly disastrous, yet he repeatedly interprets the resulting hostility as evidence that there is something wrong with everyone else.
It is a particularly contemporary form of horror.
The world hasn’t necessarily turned against Carroll.
Carroll has simply constructed a worldview in which it must have.
This is where Bagworm finds its sharpest satirical edge. Its protagonist’s paranoia and resentment place him within the orbit of the modern manosphere, where personal failure can be transformed into political grievance and loneliness becomes evidence of a conspiracy rather than an invitation to self-reflection. Critics have similarly read the film as an exploration of toxic masculinity, male isolation and the tendency to externalise personal misery.
Bernsen’s achievement is that he doesn’t make this entirely miserable to watch.
Bagworm is often very funny.
Not necessarily comfortable funny, and certainly not always “laugh with the character” funny. Much of the humour comes from watching Carroll’s increasingly bizarre attempts to navigate ordinary social situations while apparently possessing no ability to recognise how thoroughly he is sabotaging himself.
The comedy works because there is something painfully recognisable beneath the grotesquerie.
We’ve all encountered some version of Carroll.
Perhaps not quite this version.
Hopefully.
Peter Falls gives the film an important centre of gravity. Carroll is repellent without becoming entirely abstract. There are flashes of vulnerability beneath the hostility, moments where the character seems less like a cartoon of internet-age masculinity and more like a desperately unhappy man who has spent so long blaming everyone else that he no longer knows how to examine himself.
That distinction matters.
Because Bagworm isn’t particularly interested in redemption.
It isn’t a story about a troubled man discovering the error of his ways and becoming a better person. Instead, it watches him continue digging, apparently oblivious to the fact that he is holding the shovel.
And then it makes the shovel increasingly disgusting.
The physical deterioration is where Bernsen’s filmmaking becomes particularly effective. The film’s grubby aesthetic gives the horror a distinctly tactile quality, while Carroll’s deteriorating body increasingly resembles the physical embodiment of his internal state. The world around him feels just as diseased as he is.
His house is decaying.
His relationships are decaying.
His body is decaying.
And somehow Carroll remains convinced that the problem is everybody else.
That is the joke.
And the tragedy.
Bagworm isn’t always as controlled as its best moments suggest. Its deliberately abrasive tone can become exhausting, and its third act doesn’t quite sustain the same combination of psychological unease and dark comedy that makes the earlier sections so compelling. Even critics who responded strongly to the film have noted that its various stylistic and thematic ambitions don’t always land with equal force.
But there is something admirable about the sheer unpleasantness of it.
Bernsen isn’t attempting to make Carroll conventionally sympathetic. Instead, he asks us to look at a particularly ugly form of contemporary loneliness and watch what happens when isolation, resentment and paranoia are allowed to feed one another.
The result is body horror with a distinctly social infection.
The rusty nail gets into Carroll’s foot.
The paranoia gets into his head.
And before long, it becomes difficult to tell where the disease ends and the man begins.
That is what makes Bagworm considerably more than another gross-out horror film.
It is a portrait of a man rotting from the inside out — and a world that may not be quite as responsible for the smell as he thinks.
SUFF #20
Bagworm screens as part of Sydney Underground Film Festival #20, celebrating the festival’s 20th anniversary at Factory Theatre, Marrickville.
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.
There is something inherently unsettling about a dream.
Not necessarily because of what happens within it, but because of the strange rules governing the experience. Familiar places become alien. People we know acquire unfamiliar faces. Memories surface without invitation. Cause and effect become slippery. And beneath it all is the uncomfortable knowledge that the nightmare is coming from somewhere inside us.
Lucid, the surreal art-punk horror film from Canadian filmmakers Deanna Milligan and Ramsey Fendall, takes that premise and runs headlong into the subconscious.
Set in the 1990s, the film follows Mia Sunshine Jones (Caitlin Acken Taylor), an art student whose creative ambitions are beginning to collapse beneath the weight of a seemingly insurmountable block. With her place at art school under threat, Mia turns to a mysterious lucid-dreaming elixir in the hope that she can unlock the creativity she feels slipping away.
Instead, she opens a door that perhaps should have remained closed.
The resulting descent into dreams, memories and increasingly monstrous manifestations makes Lucid less interested in conventional nightmare mechanics than in the uncomfortable connection between creation and self-examination.
For Mia, the problem isn’t simply that she can’t make art.
It is that she may not yet understand what she is trying to express.
Milligan and Fendall approach this psychological territory with an appropriately handmade aesthetic. Shot on 35mm and Super 8, Lucid has a tactile quality that distinguishes it from the increasingly polished digital language of contemporary genre cinema. The imagery feels deliberately unstable, as though the film itself is slipping between waking reality and the fragmented visual language of a dream.
That is where Lucid becomes most compelling.
Rather than treating lucid dreaming as a convenient supernatural gimmick, the film uses it as a mechanism for peeling away the layers Mia has constructed around herself. The deeper she travels into this increasingly fractured reality, the more difficult it becomes to distinguish between imagination, memory and emotional trauma.
The monsters, consequently, are more than things to be feared.
They are things to be confronted.
One of the film’s most striking ideas is that artistic expression cannot necessarily be separated from the experiences that produce it. Creativity may be liberating, but it can also be invasive. To create something genuinely personal may require confronting the parts of yourself that you would rather leave buried.
That makes Lucid an interesting companion piece to some of the more traditional forms of body and psychological horror appearing at SUFF this year. Where films such as Bagworm externalise transformation through the physical body, Lucid turns inward. Its battleground is the imagination itself.
And imagination proves to be a particularly dangerous place.
There is an undeniable influence of 1990s alternative and underground culture running through the film, but Lucid isn’t simply nostalgic window dressing. Its period setting becomes part of the film’s identity: a world of handmade art, subcultures and analogue imagery that feels particularly appropriate for a story about an artist struggling to discover her own voice. The filmmakers’ use of 35mm and Super 8 reinforces that connection, giving the film an aesthetic that feels deliberately tactile and imperfect.
It is also a film willing to take risks.
At times, those risks work against it. Lucid isn’t particularly interested in holding the audience’s hand, and its narrative can become as fragmented as the dreamscape through which Mia is travelling. There are moments when the symbolism threatens to overwhelm the story itself.
But that is also part of the film’s appeal.
Lucid isn’t particularly interested in behaving itself.
It wants to be strange.
It wants to be messy.
It wants to crawl inside the head of its protagonist and rummage around in the places where memory, fear and creativity become indistinguishable.
And for a film about an artist desperately searching for inspiration, there is something wonderfully appropriate about that approach.
The result is an ambitious piece of independent horror that feels less concerned with delivering a neatly constructed nightmare than with asking what happens when we deliberately surrender control of our own minds.
Sometimes the things we discover there are frightening.
Sometimes they’re grotesque.
And sometimes they are the very things we need to confront before we can create anything worth showing the world.
Lucid may occasionally lose its way inside its own dreamscape, but its willingness to embrace uncertainty is precisely what makes it such an intriguing piece of underground cinema.
SUFF #20
Lucid screens Friday 11 September at 7:45pm in Cinema 3 as part of the Sydney Underground Film Festival’s 20th anniversary program at Factory Theatre, Marrickville.
There is a peculiar pleasure in watching a cinematic disaster being taken seriously. Not excused, exactly, but examined with enough curiosity to discover what might have been buried beneath the wreckage.
Few films arrive with quite the baggage of Exorcist II: The Heretic. John Boorman’s 1977 follow-up to William Friedkin’s The Exorcist has spent decades occupying that strange territory reserved for movies that are discussed almost as much for their failure as for their contents. A notorious sequel. A critical punching bag. A cinematic oddity. A film so frequently invoked as an example of Hollywood hubris that its actual ambitions can become almost incidental.
David Kittredge’s Boorman and the Devil is interested in those ambitions.
Rather than constructing another gleeful autopsy of one of cinema’s most infamous misfires, Kittredge approaches The Heretic with something considerably more valuable: curiosity. The result is a documentary about a much-maligned horror sequel that gradually reveals itself to be less interested in proving that everyone was wrong than in asking why anyone would attempt something so strange in the first place.
On paper, the sequel looked almost impossibly well positioned. Boorman arrived having already established himself as a filmmaker of considerable ambition, while The Exorcist had become a cultural phenomenon. Yet instead of attempting to reproduce Friedkin’s approach, Boorman took the material somewhere considerably more abstract.
And that, perhaps, was the original sin.
The Exorcist II: The Heretic isn’t particularly interested in being The Exorcist II in the conventional sense. It is stranger, more metaphysical and more concerned with ideas than the straightforward continuation audiences might reasonably have expected. The result is a film that can feel less like a conventional horror sequel than a fever dream constructed from fragments of mythology, psychology and spiritual inquiry.
Kittredge understands that contradiction is precisely where the story becomes interesting.
The documentary’s greatest strength is its refusal to reduce The Heretic to either of the two easiest interpretations: misunderstood masterpiece or unmitigated disaster. Instead, Boorman and the Devil allows both possibilities to coexist.
There is plenty here to remind us why the film was so violently rejected. The production was troubled, the tonal shifts were substantial and the distance between what audiences expected and what Boorman attempted was enormous. Yet alongside those failures sits an extraordinary amount of artistic ambition.
That ambition is what Kittredge wants us to reconsider.
The documentary benefits enormously from access to Boorman himself. His presence gives the film an immediacy that no amount of archival reconstruction could quite replicate. Alongside him are recollections from Linda Blair and Louise Fletcher, while contemporary filmmakers including Mike Flanagan and Karyn Kusama offer their own perspectives on the film’s peculiar legacy.
What emerges is less a conventional making-of documentary than a meditation on artistic risk.
That distinction matters.
There is something increasingly unusual about the idea of a major studio giving an established filmmaker the resources to make something genuinely eccentric. Contemporary filmmaking is hardly devoid of experimentation, but the scale at which The Heretic was allowed to pursue its particular vision feels increasingly alien.
Kittredge consequently finds something unexpectedly contemporary in a film that was once dismissed as an embarrassing relic.
Boorman and the Devil asks us to consider whether failure itself has become too threatening to contemporary filmmaking. A film that takes no risks can be competent, polished and entirely forgettable. A film that takes enormous risks can collapse spectacularly — but it can also produce images, ideas and artistic possibilities that would never have existed had everyone involved simply played it safe.
That makes The Heretic a fascinating subject not merely because it failed, but because it failed while attempting something.
And there is a difference.
Kittredge’s documentary is at its most compelling when it recognises that the history of cinema is littered with films whose reputations have changed because the cultural conversation around them changed. Sometimes reassessment reveals a genuine masterpiece. Sometimes it merely makes a fascinating failure more fascinating.
Boorman and the Devil doesn’t necessarily need to convince you that The Exorcist II: The Heretic is secretly a great film.
It only needs to make you curious enough to watch it again.
That is a considerably more interesting proposition.
For horror audiences, there is another reason the documentary resonates. Genre cinema has always been particularly susceptible to critical dismissal when it refuses to behave according to expectation. The horror sequel is expected to deliver familiar pleasures with familiar machinery. Boorman instead delivered something dreamlike, philosophical and formally eccentric.
The question isn’t whether that decision worked.
The question is whether we still value filmmakers enough to allow them to make that decision.
In an era increasingly dominated by intellectual property, established formulas and the gravitational pull of audience expectation, Boorman and the Devil becomes an accidental argument for artistic recklessness. Not recklessness without consequence, but the kind that accepts that failure is occasionally the admission price for originality.
There is something rather fitting about a documentary examining one of Hollywood’s great cinematic disasters arriving at that conclusion.
Perhaps The Heretic wasn’t a failure because John Boorman reached too far.
Perhaps its real failure was that audiences weren’t prepared for where he reached.
Boorman and the Devil doesn’t erase the film’s flaws, nor should it. Instead, it digs through the wreckage and finds something considerably more valuable than a verdict: the evidence of ambition.
And sometimes that is enough reason to look again.
SUFF #20
Boorman and the Devil screens Friday 11 September at 7:45pm as part of the 20th Sydney Underground Film Festival at Factory Theatre.
Sleep is supposed to be the great surrender. We close our eyes, relinquish control and allow consciousness to dissolve into whatever strange machinery waits on the other side. Horror has long understood the vulnerability of that state, from the nightmare logic of A Nightmare on Elm Street to the psychological labyrinths of contemporary supernatural cinema. Parasomnia takes that familiar anxiety and gives it a promising contemporary framework: what happens when the thing haunting your dreams stops respecting the border between sleep and waking life?
Directed by James Ross II, the Shudder Original places Jasmine Mathews’ Riley at the centre of a story shaped by night terrors, unresolved trauma and disappearance. When her best friend becomes the latest person to vanish, Riley begins to suspect that the demonic presence stalking her dreams may have found a way into the waking world. It is an immediately attractive premise, one that offers the possibility of psychological horror, supernatural mystery and nightmare imagery existing simultaneously, with Riley’s own fractured perception leaving us uncertain about where one state ends and another begins.
Unfortunately, Parasomnia never quite manages to turn that intriguing foundation into the film it initially promises to be.
There is plenty here to admire. The central concept has genuine potential, particularly in the way it connects Riley’s trauma with the supernatural threat. Rather than simply introducing a demon and allowing it to run amok, the film attempts to make the creature part of a larger psychological landscape. Riley’s night terrors are not merely convenient vehicles for scares; they are connected to grief, memory and the unresolved events that have shaped her life. That gives the supernatural elements an emotional foundation, even if the eventual story struggles to build upon it.
Jasmine Mathews is particularly strong in the lead. Riley could easily have become a conventional horror protagonist — traumatised, frightened and increasingly convinced that nobody believes her — but Mathews gives the character a more complicated interior life. There is a convincing fragility to her performance, but also a determination that prevents Riley from becoming passive. She carries the film through some of its weaker narrative stretches, grounding the more fantastical material in recognisable human emotion.
That becomes increasingly important as the storyline begins to show its limitations.
The problem with a horror film built around dreams is that the possibilities are virtually limitless. Once the audience understands that reality itself may be unreliable, the filmmaker has access to a wonderfully unstable cinematic space. A bedroom can become a trap. A familiar face can become threatening. A mundane location can suddenly acquire the logic of a nightmare. The rules of reality can be stretched, distorted or discarded entirely.
Parasomnia occasionally understands this, but too often it seems reluctant to fully embrace the possibilities of its own premise.
The film’s strongest moments are those in which uncertainty takes precedence over explanation. When Riley is caught between sleep and waking, the question isn’t necessarily whether what she is experiencing is real, but whether reality still provides a useful distinction. Those sequences possess an unnerving ambiguity, allowing the horror to operate somewhere between psychological breakdown and supernatural intrusion.
Yet the more the film attempts to explain its mythology, the less compelling that ambiguity becomes.
This is a recurring problem with supernatural horror. The unknown is often considerably more frightening than the known, particularly when the unknown exists inside something as personal and uncontrollable as a nightmare. Once the film begins establishing the mechanics behind its demonic presence, some of the mystery starts to evaporate. The audience is no longer trapped inside Riley’s uncertainty; we are increasingly being given the answers.
And unfortunately, those answers aren’t always particularly satisfying.
The storyline feels serviceable rather than revelatory. There are ideas here that could have produced something considerably more psychologically intricate, particularly around trauma and the persistence of grief, but the screenplay frequently settles for conventional supernatural-horror machinery. Characters move towards revelations because the narrative requires them to, discoveries arrive with an increasingly familiar rhythm and the mystery ultimately feels less substantial than the concept that initially introduced it.
This is where Parasomnia becomes frustrating rather than outright disappointing.
Because there is clearly a better film lurking inside it.
The concept is strong. The performances are strong. The atmosphere is often effective. There are moments where the film creates precisely the kind of disorientation it needs, leaving Riley — and the audience — uncertain about whether they are experiencing a nightmare or something considerably more tangible.
But those ingredients don’t quite coalesce into a satisfying whole.
The supernatural entity itself is another example of this imbalance. As an idea, a demonic figure capable of moving between dreams and reality is an excellent horror proposition. It weaponises one of humanity’s most universal vulnerabilities: sleep. There is something deeply unsettling about the possibility that closing your eyes doesn’t protect you from the monster, but actually gives it access to you.
Yet the creature ultimately feels more effective as an idea than as a fully realised antagonist.
The film is strongest when the demon remains at the periphery of Riley’s experience, when its presence is suggested through fragments and disturbances rather than presented as something that needs to be completely understood. Once it becomes a more conventional supernatural threat, Parasomnia loses some of the psychological unease that made its premise so attractive.
There is also a noticeable tension between the film’s ambitions and its storytelling. It wants to explore trauma, grief, friendship and the lingering consequences of tragedy while simultaneously delivering supernatural thrills. Those elements are not incompatible — horror has been doing exactly that for decades — but they require a narrative capable of allowing the emotional and genre components to reinforce one another.
Here, they sometimes feel like separate tracks running alongside each other.
Riley’s emotional history gives the horror meaning, but the horror doesn’t always deepen our understanding of Riley.
That distinction matters.
The best psychological horror makes the monster inseparable from the character confronting it. The supernatural threat becomes an external expression of something internal, allowing every encounter with the creature to reveal something about the protagonist. Parasomnia gestures towards that territory without quite committing to it.
As a result, the film’s emotional material can feel somewhat underdeveloped just when it should be reaching its greatest intensity.
That is particularly evident in the final act.
Without venturing into spoilers, the conclusion struggles to deliver the catharsis that the preceding story seems to be building towards. The film has established a compelling relationship between Riley’s trauma and the supernatural threat, but the eventual resolution doesn’t quite capitalise on that connection. Instead of transforming the earlier ideas into something thematically resonant, the ending largely feels like the narrative arriving at its required destination.
It isn’t disastrous.
It simply isn’t enough.
And that distinction is important because Parasomnia is never a bad film. It is an intermittently effective one that repeatedly demonstrates what it could have been. There are enough strong ideas and performances here to make the experience worthwhile, but also enough conventional storytelling to prevent it from becoming the psychologically disquieting nightmare its premise suggests.
Mathews remains the film’s greatest asset. Her performance gives Riley emotional credibility even when the screenplay becomes predictable, and she brings enough vulnerability and resolve to make the character worth following. The supporting performances similarly help maintain the film’s human dimension, preventing the supernatural material from becoming entirely detached from the people experiencing it.
Ultimately, however, Parasomnia is caught between two versions of itself.
One is a strange, unsettling psychological horror about trauma invading dreams and nightmares crossing into reality. That film is genuinely intriguing. It understands that the most frightening aspect of sleep is not necessarily what we dream about, but the surrender of control that makes dreaming possible in the first place.
The other is a more conventional supernatural thriller that needs to explain its mythology, organise its scares and eventually provide answers.
The first film is considerably more interesting than the second.
When Parasomnia embraces uncertainty, it works. When it allows Riley’s perception to become unstable and makes us question whether the nightmare has crossed over or whether Riley is simply losing her grip on reality, the film finds its unsettling centre. But whenever it retreats into familiar supernatural storytelling, the tension dissipates.
There is a good horror movie buried somewhere within Parasomnia. At times, you can almost see it clawing its way to the surface.
What ultimately holds it back is not a lack of ideas, atmosphere or talent. It is that the story doesn’t quite know what to do with all three.
The Prognosis:
Parasomnia is a film with a genuinely strong horror concept and committed performances, particularly from Jasmine Mathews, but its mediocre storyline prevents the material from reaching its full potential. It is worth entering the nightmare for the atmosphere and ideas; just don’t expect the waking world to provide quite the payoff you’re hoping for.
There are Australian films that attempt to explain Australia. There are Australian films that attempt to romanticise it. Then there is Dead-End Drive-In, Brian Trenchard-Smith’s magnificent, deranged vision of a country that has looked at its own future, shrugged, and decided the best thing to do is throw everyone into a drive-in, feed them cheeseburgers, give them drugs and make sure they never leave.
Forty years on, Dead-End Drive-In remains one of the strangest and most exhilarating films to emerge from the great Australian exploitation boom. Released in 1986, it is ostensibly a dystopian science-fiction thriller, but that description hardly begins to contain the thing. It is a car movie, a punk movie, a prison movie, a satire of consumer culture, a portrait of youth alienation, a social nightmare and, inevitably for a Brian Trenchard-Smith film, an excuse to launch increasingly large pieces of machinery through the air.
It is also one of those rare films that becomes more interesting the more seriously you take it.
Because beneath the outrageous costumes, the spectacular stunt work, the burnt-out cars and the general sensation that someone has spiked the national cinema with amphetamines, Dead-End Drive-In is asking an unnervingly serious question: what happens when a society decides that its unwanted people are easier to contain than to help?
The answer, according to Trenchard-Smith, is apparently to build a prison that looks exactly like a Saturday night at the movies.
THE MAN WHO NEVER KNEW HOW TO BEHAVE
To understand Dead-End Drive-In, you have to understand Brian Trenchard-Smith. Not because the film is some carefully controlled expression of auteurist intent, but because his career represents almost the exact opposite of the respectable model of Australian filmmaking. Trenchard-Smith has always seemed happiest when genre conventions are being thrown into the air and collided together at considerable velocity.
He could make martial-arts exploitation, horror, science fiction, children’s adventure, action cinema and television, often with the same gleeful disregard for the boundaries separating them. The Man from Hong Kong, Turkey Shoot, BMX Bandits and Dead-End Drive-In may appear to belong to entirely different cinematic universes, yet they share an unmistakable physicality. Trenchard-Smith likes movement. He likes spectacle. He likes bodies being thrown around spaces. He likes machinery being pushed beyond its sensible limits. Most importantly, he understands that exploitation cinema does not have to choose between being entertaining and being about something.
Dead-End Drive-In might be the clearest expression of that philosophy.
It is ridiculous, but it is not stupid. It is politically charged without ever becoming a lecture. It is visually extravagant despite its relatively modest resources. It is adolescent, lurid and occasionally uncomfortable, but beneath all that noise is a remarkably clear understanding of the social anxieties of the Australia that produced it.
Trenchard-Smith simply refuses to deliver those ideas politely.
He gives them a chainsaw.
WELCOME TO THE STAR
The premise is brutally simple. Jimmy “Crabs” Rossini and his girlfriend Carmen arrive at the Star Drive-In after suffering car trouble. They expect an evening at the movies. Instead, they discover that the drive-in has effectively become a detention centre for unemployed and socially unwanted young people.
The government does not need to execute them. It does not even need to rehabilitate them. It simply needs to remove them from the functioning parts of society and make their confinement sufficiently comfortable that they stop asking questions.
The Star provides food, entertainment, drugs and companionship. It becomes a world within a world, a brightly illuminated enclosure where the inmates are encouraged to consume themselves into submission.
This is where Dead-End Drive-In becomes considerably more sophisticated than its lurid surface suggests. The prison does not look like a prison. There are no obvious dungeon walls or endless corridors of concrete. There is a snack bar. There are cars. There is music. There are movies playing on a huge screen.
The inmates are not simply denied freedom. They are given enough distractions that freedom begins to seem unnecessary.
THE PERFECT PRISON IS ONE YOU DON’T WANT TO ESCAPE
That remains the film’s most disturbing idea.
The authorities have not created a traditional authoritarian nightmare. They have created a lifestyle. The inmates are surrounded by the very things that a consumer society tells them should make them happy. Food, television, entertainment, drugs, sex and material possessions become substitutes for employment, purpose and political agency.
The genius of the Star is that it doesn’t have to convince its inhabitants that they are free. It only has to convince them that freedom is inconvenient.
Why leave when there is food?
Why work when there is television?
Why build a future when the present is entertaining?
Why protest when you can get high?
The film’s dystopia therefore operates through distraction as much as repression. The system has discovered that the easiest way to control a population is not necessarily to terrify it, but to keep it occupied.
That makes Dead-End Drive-In feel remarkably prescient. Its junk food, consumerism and endless entertainment are not simply background details. They are the architecture of the prison.
THE DRIVE-IN AS AUSTRALIA
The choice of the drive-in is particularly inspired because the drive-in was itself such a recognisable part of Australian popular culture. It was a place associated with freedom, leisure, adolescence and the ability to temporarily escape the routines of everyday life.
Trenchard-Smith takes that cultural memory and turns it inside out.
The drive-in is no longer somewhere you visit to escape society.
It is somewhere society sends you when it has decided that you are no longer useful.
That reversal gives the film’s central location a strange melancholy. The Star feels simultaneously futuristic and nostalgic, like a discarded piece of Australian culture that has been repurposed as a holding pen for the future.
The cars remain. The screen remains. The food remains. The entertainment continues.
Only the audience has become the prisoner.
AND THEN THERE ARE THE CARS
Of course, this is Brian Trenchard-Smith, so the automobile cannot merely be symbolic.
The car in Dead-End Drive-In is a status symbol, a shelter, a weapon, an object of desire and, most importantly, an expression of mobility. Yet the film takes particular pleasure in turning that symbolism against itself. Cars are everywhere, but nobody is actually going anywhere.
The inhabitants of the Star sleep in their vehicles. They decorate them. They identify with them. They use them to establish status within the enclosed society. The automobile, traditionally one of the great symbols of freedom, has become another part of the prison.
That contradiction is everywhere in the film. The people have cars but no roads to freedom. They have entertainment but no meaningful future. They have food but no purpose. They have choices, provided those choices remain within the boundaries established for them.
The whole film can almost be understood as a gigantic metaphor for having the accelerator pressed firmly against the floor while the vehicle remains stationary.
Naturally, Trenchard-Smith eventually decides that the metaphor requires an actual vehicle to fly through the air.
THE GONZO AUSTRALIA OF BRIAN TRENCHARD-SMITH
There is something gloriously Australian about the film’s refusal to be subtle. Economic collapse becomes a wasteland of burnt-out vehicles. Youth alienation becomes a sea of punk costumes and leather. Government oppression becomes an electrified fence around a drive-in. Consumerism becomes junk food and television. Social exclusion becomes a population of young people deliberately abandoned inside a recreational complex.
The apocalypse is not presented as some distant future catastrophe.
It is the present turned up to eleven.
This is one of Trenchard-Smith’s great gifts. He understands that exploitation cinema can exaggerate reality until the exaggeration becomes a form of truth. Dead-End Drive-In does not seriously attempt to predict what Australia will look like. Instead, it takes the anxieties already present in Australian society and magnifies them until they become almost absurd.
The result is a kind of gonzo social realism.
Everything is too loud. Everything is too colourful. Everyone is slightly too grotesque. The cars are too damaged. The violence is too spectacular. The costumes are too outrageous.
And yet you can recognise the world underneath it.
That is where the satire bites.
A WORLD BUILT FROM JUNK
The Star itself looks as though civilisation has been put through a meat grinder and then handed over to a gang of teenagers with a spray can. Burnt-out cars, graffiti, concrete, rubbish, punk fashion and industrial decay transform the location into a junkyard version of the future.
The film’s production design is crucial because Trenchard-Smith does not need to build some enormous futuristic metropolis. He can find the apocalypse in the Australian landscape that already exists.
The apocalypse is a car park.
The apocalypse is a takeaway counter.
The apocalypse is an abandoned industrial space.
The apocalypse is a generation of young people who have been told that there is no future and have consequently stopped behaving as though one exists.
Most disturbingly, the apocalypse is brightly lit.
THE UNCOMFORTABLE POLITICS OF THE STAR
It would be easy to celebrate Dead-End Drive-In entirely on the basis of its aesthetic pleasures, but doing so would ignore some of the film’s more uncomfortable dimensions.
Its treatment of race, immigration and Australian identity deserves scrutiny. The film emerges from a period when anxieties surrounding immigration, economic decline and the changing nature of Australian society were deeply embedded in political and popular culture. Those anxieties find their way into the Star, where displaced populations are effectively contained and removed from the mainstream.
This is one of the reasons Dead-End Drive-In is more interesting than simply being an anarchic Ozploitation spectacle. The film does not merely show us a dystopian Australia. It shows us what that Australia is afraid of.
It is afraid of unemployment.
It is afraid of youth.
It is afraid of social disorder.
It is afraid of outsiders.
It is afraid of economic collapse.
It is afraid that the institutions supposedly responsible for maintaining order might themselves be incapable of solving the problems they have created.
Those fears do not necessarily make the film politically progressive. Some of its imagery remains troubling. But that does not make it irrelevant. Quite the opposite. The discomfort is part of what makes the film worth revisiting.
Dystopian cinema can reveal a culture’s anxieties as clearly as it reveals its aspirations.
JIMMY CRABS AND THE REFUSAL TO STAY PUT
Ned Manning’s Jimmy is therefore crucial because he refuses the bargain.
Everyone else has adapted to the Star. Jimmy hasn’t.
His rebellion is not particularly intellectual. He doesn’t deliver great political speeches. He simply refuses to accept that this is all there is.
That makes him strangely radical.
In a world where the system has convinced people to accept captivity as comfort, the simple desire to leave becomes an act of resistance.
Jimmy still believes that there is something beyond the fence.
That belief is the most dangerous thing about him.
CARMEN AND THE HORROR OF ADAPTATION
Natalie McCurry’s Carmen complicates the film’s simplistic notion of resistance. She begins to adapt to the Star, and that adaptation is both understandable and disturbing.
Because people do adapt.
They adapt to poverty. They adapt to confinement. They adapt to political instability. They adapt to bad conditions. They adapt because sometimes adaptation is the only available survival mechanism.
The Star does not need everyone to love it.
It simply needs people to stop imagining anything else.
Jimmy wants to escape.
Carmen learns how to survive inside.
Neither response is entirely comfortable.
THE MOVIES WITHIN THE MOVIE
The films being screened inside the Star provide another layer to Trenchard-Smith’s satire. The inmates watch exploitation movies while simultaneously living inside one.
Violence is entertainment.
Violence is fantasy.
Violence is spectacle.
Then violence spills beyond the screen.
The audience watches people watching movies, and those people are themselves watching images that reflect the world they inhabit. It creates an endless feedback loop between screen violence and social violence.
Trenchard-Smith’s answer to this complicated observation is, naturally, not to stop making violent movies.
He makes the violence bigger.
That is part of the joke.
Dead-End Drive-In is itself an exploitation movie critiquing a culture of exploitation.
It knows exactly what it is doing.
THE TRUCK JUMP
Eventually, all of this social commentary has to give way to the inevitable.
The truck jumps.
The climactic stunt remains one of the film’s great moments because it encapsulates Trenchard-Smith’s entire filmmaking philosophy. The film has spent all this time talking about captivity, consumerism, social control and the collapse of Australian society, and then suddenly a vehicle is flying through the air.
There is something almost philosophically perfect about that.
The truck is not merely escaping the Star.
It is escaping the limitations of the film itself.
After all the political anxiety, the satire and the symbolism, Trenchard-Smith simply says: enough.
Make it bigger.
Make it faster.
Make it fly.
That is not a failure of seriousness.
It is Trenchard-Smith’s definition of seriousness.
OZPLOITATION WITH A BRAIN
This is perhaps the mistake people make when discussing Australian exploitation cinema. They assume a film must either be trash or a masterpiece.
Dead-End Drive-In is both.
It is trashy.
It is intelligent.
It is adolescent.
It is politically loaded.
It is visually sophisticated.
It is exploitative.
It is genuinely interested in Australian society.
The contradiction is precisely what makes it work.
Trenchard-Smith understands that audiences might come for the cars, the punk costumes, the violence and the dystopian spectacle. So he gives them all of it.
Then he hides the political argument inside the popcorn.
A FILM THAT ARRIVED TOO EARLY
Perhaps Dead-End Drive-In was simply released at the wrong moment.
Australian audiences were still being encouraged to think of Australian genre cinema as something inferior to Hollywood. A film this strange, this aggressively Australian and this unwilling to behave itself was never going to fit comfortably into the mainstream.
Its initial commercial failure is therefore one of cinema’s more satisfying ironies.
The film depicts a society that has failed to recognise the value of its own discarded population.
Australian cinema subsequently spent years doing something similar to Dead-End Drive-In itself.
It was sitting there.
Covered in graffiti.
Surrounded by wrecked cars.
Waiting for someone to realise what they were looking at.
Eventually, the audience arrived.
THE GREAT AUSTRALIAN ANARCHIST
Forty years later, perhaps the best way to celebrate Dead-End Drive-In is not to pretend that it is perfect.
It isn’t.
Some of its politics are uncomfortable. Some of its ideas are more fully developed than others. Its aesthetic is unmistakably tied to the decade that produced it.
But perfection would almost miss the point.
Brian Trenchard-Smith has never been a filmmaker of polite surfaces. His cinema is physical. It is interested in impact, movement and spectacle. The machinery matters. The bodies matter. The stunt matters.
His films want you to feel the physicality of cinema.
The car hits the barrier.
The engine screams.
The body flies.
The gate electrifies.
The world collapses.
And Dead-End Drive-In might be his purest expression of that sensibility.
It is a dystopian science-fiction film, a punk film, a car movie, a prison movie, a social satire, a romance, an exploitation picture and an Australian nightmare.
And somehow, against all reason, it is also enormous fun.
THE PRICE OF ADMISSION
The title is perfect.
Dead-End Drive-In is not merely a description of the place in which Jimmy finds himself trapped. It is a description of the society surrounding him.
Everyone has arrived at the end of the road.
There is no future.
So consume.
There is no meaningful employment.
So entertain yourself.
There is no escape.
So decorate the prison.
There is no hope.
So turn the music up.
And if anyone complains, give them another cheeseburger.
That is the genius of Trenchard-Smith’s dystopia. It is not controlled by some grand totalitarian mastermind. It is maintained by administrative indifference and the quiet acceptance of everyone who has decided that resistance is too much trouble.
The system does not need to explain itself.
It simply keeps operating.
People disappear into the Star.
The movies continue playing.
The food keeps coming.
The cars keep burning.
And outside the fence, everybody else carries on.
FORTY YEARS IN THE REAR-VIEW MIRROR
Forty years later, Dead-End Drive-In feels less like a relic than a warning that has become increasingly difficult to ignore.
Its anxieties about unemployment, consumerism, youth alienation, social exclusion and institutional neglect remain remarkably potent. Its punk aesthetic has become retro. Its cars have become objects of affection. Its drive-in has disappeared.
Its future, meanwhile, has arrived in fragments.
Perhaps that is why the film has endured.
It never really predicted Australia.
It exaggerated Australia.
It took existing anxieties and turned the volume knob until the speakers exploded.
That is what Brian Trenchard-Smith does.
He does not whisper.
He does not gently suggest.
He kicks the door in, sets the car on fire, throws the television through the window and then asks whether you’ve noticed what is happening.
THE GATES ARE STILL CLOSED
There is a moment in Dead-End Drive-In when the absurdity finally becomes clear. The prison isn’t simply the electrified fence. It isn’t the guards. It isn’t the government. It isn’t even the Star.
The prison is the idea that there is nowhere else to go.
That is why Jimmy has to escape. Not simply because he wants freedom, but because he still believes freedom exists.
And perhaps that is the film’s most enduring act of rebellion.
In a genre packed with nihilism, Dead-End Drive-In still believes that someone can look at the wreckage and say no. No, I don’t want this. No, I don’t accept this. No, this isn’t the future.
I’m getting in the car.
I’m hitting the accelerator.
I’m going through the fence.
And if Brian Trenchard-Smith is directing, there will probably be a truck flying overhead when you do it.
That is Dead-End Drive-In at 40: a film about a country staring into the abyss and deciding to install a snack bar; a film about capitalism, captivity and consumption disguised as a car chase; a film about a generation being told that the future has already been cancelled.
And a filmmaker who responded to that bleak proposition with the only reasonable answer he could think of.
The opening minutes of Passenger suggest that André Øvredal might have found another wonderfully confined nightmare.
A couple comes across a gruesome accident on an isolated stretch of highway. The darkness is oppressive, the road seemingly endless and the wreckage offers just enough information to make us suspicious of what we are seeing. Something is wrong. Something is watching. And when the couple eventually realise that whatever was responsible for the accident has followed them, Passenger briefly becomes the kind of lean, atmospheric horror film that Øvredal has demonstrated an instinct for before.
It is a particularly tantalising beginning from the director of The Autopsy of Jane Doe, a film that understood how to extract extraordinary tension from a restricted space and an increasingly disturbing mystery.
Unfortunately, Passenger spends much of the journey trying to find its way back to that opening.
What begins as a potentially unnerving supernatural road movie gradually becomes a predictable procession of demonic appearances, mythology dumps and familiar jump scares. The highway offers isolation, movement and endless possibility, but the film increasingly feels as though it is travelling in circles.
There is a good horror film trapped somewhere inside Passenger.
Unfortunately, it never quite gets out.
The Road Less Interesting
The premise is undeniably appealing.
Maddie and Tyler have embraced van life, leaving behind their previous existence to travel across America. The open road is supposed to represent freedom, escape and reinvention. Instead, after stopping at the scene of a horrific accident, their journey becomes a nightmare from which they cannot simply drive away.
There is something inherently cinematic about horror on the highway.
The road is a liminal space. It connects places without belonging to any of them. It can be empty for miles, leaving travellers isolated from help. At night, the world is reduced to headlights, darkness and whatever might be waiting beyond the reach of the beams.
Cinema has exploited that anxiety for decades, from Duel and The Hitcher to Jeepers Creepers and countless other variations on the idea that stopping on the wrong stretch of road can have consequences.
Passenger has all the ingredients.
What it doesn’t always have is the imagination to make them feel new.
The Autopsy of Jane Doe Effect
This is perhaps what makes the film most frustrating.
André Øvredal has already demonstrated how good he can be at turning limited environments into engines of suspense. The Autopsy of Jane Doe remains such an effective piece of horror because its mystery is allowed to accumulate gradually. A seemingly straightforward situation becomes progressively stranger, and the physical limitations of the morgue make escape increasingly difficult.
Passenger initially seems to promise a similar experience.
The van becomes the new morgue.
The highway becomes the new enclosed chamber.
The darkness outside becomes something unknowable.
But rather than allowing that uncertainty to breathe, the film increasingly explains itself.
And once the Passenger stops being a mysterious presence and becomes a set of supernatural rules, the film loses much of its power.
The Monster Is Better Before We Meet Him
The Passenger himself is a potentially effective horror creation.
There is something inherently unsettling about the figure that appears at the roadside. The idea of a supernatural entity attached to travellers and accidents has a folkloric quality that could have given the film a genuinely sinister identity.
The problem is that the more the film explains him, the less frightening he becomes.
Mystery is often the most valuable currency in supernatural horror.
What is that thing?
Why is it there?
What does it want?
What happens if we encounter it?
Passenger answers these questions with increasing enthusiasm.
And each answer diminishes the fear.
The entity eventually feels less like an unknowable evil stalking the highway and more like a horror villain operating according to a list of rules that the screenplay has conveniently provided for us.
The mythology may explain the Passenger.
It doesn’t make him more interesting.
The Hobo Code
The film attempts to build its mythology around the idea of signs and symbols used by travellers and outsiders, incorporating religious folklore and what is presented as a “hobo code” into the supernatural history of the Passenger.
There is an intriguing film hiding inside this idea.
The highway is already filled with stories. Missing people, roadside memorials, abandoned buildings, forgotten towns and travellers who never reached their destinations could have provided the foundation for something genuinely folkloric.
Instead, the mythology often feels like exposition arriving to explain what the audience should already have been allowed to fear.
The film’s greatest mistake is not that its mythology is too complicated.
It is that the mythology is less interesting than the mystery it replaces.
When the Road Becomes a Formula
The early sections of Passenger understand the importance of anticipation.
A figure glimpsed in the distance is more effective than a monster standing in full view.
A strange movement outside the van can be more unsettling than a sudden attack.
The darkness beyond the headlights is more frightening when we don’t know what might be inside it.
Øvredal occasionally demonstrates that understanding.
But too often the film opts for the easier route.
Something appears.
The music rises.
The camera moves.
The jump scare arrives.
Repeat.
The result is a horror film that increasingly telegraphs its intentions. Even the more effective sequences can feel as though they have been constructed around the expectation that the audience will know exactly when to brace themselves.
That is particularly disappointing coming from Øvredal.
His earlier work demonstrated a much greater patience with dread.
The Van Life Nightmare
There is also a missed opportunity in the film’s treatment of van life.
The idea of two people abandoning conventional domesticity for a life on the road should provide an extraordinary horror setting.
The van is simultaneously home and prison.
It offers freedom but little security.
It can take you anywhere, but once something gets inside, there is nowhere to hide.
That contradiction is terrific.
Yet Passenger doesn’t exploit it as deeply as it could.
The van becomes primarily a plot device rather than an extension of the characters’ psychological lives.
And that makes the road trip feel strangely anonymous.
The film could have explored what it means to voluntarily abandon the security of a permanent home only to discover that the open road offers no sanctuary.
Instead, the van largely becomes another location for the next supernatural encounter.
A Couple We Don’t Quite Know
The relationship between Maddie and Tyler also struggles to provide the emotional foundation the film needs.
A supernatural road movie becomes considerably more frightening when we care about the people who cannot escape the road.
But Maddie and Tyler remain somewhat thinly drawn.
Their relationship is functional enough to move the plot forward, but the film doesn’t give us enough sense of what makes them compelling as a couple before the nightmare begins.
That matters because Passenger is ultimately a story about two people trapped together.
The horror should test the relationship.
Instead, the relationship sometimes feels as though it is simply there to populate the horror.
The performances are capable, but the material doesn’t give them enough to work with.
The Promise of Øvredal
There are flashes of the film Passenger could have been.
A handful of visual ideas are genuinely striking. The nighttime sequences occasionally create an effective sense of spatial uncertainty, while Øvredal’s camera can still find interesting ways of turning apparently familiar locations into threatening environments.
One particularly inventive sequence involving a projected film spilling across the surrounding forest demonstrates the director’s ability to create imagery that is genuinely strange and memorable.
These moments remind us that the problem isn’t a lack of technical ability.
Øvredal can make a horror film look good.
He can stage a scare.
He can create atmosphere.
He can establish a threatening environment.
What Passenger lacks is a screenplay capable of consistently matching those instincts.
A Journey to Nowhere
The longer the film continues, the more its initial promise begins to evaporate.
The road should create momentum.
Instead, the narrative begins to drift.
The mystery should deepen.
Instead, it is explained.
The Passenger should become more frightening.
Instead, familiarity sets in.
And the relationship at the centre of the story should become more emotionally involving.
Instead, the characters remain largely where we found them.
This is where the film’s 94-minute running time begins to feel longer than it actually is.
There is a strange contradiction at the heart of Passenger: the film is never particularly long, but it feels as though it is taking a very long time to arrive anywhere.
It is a road movie without much sense of discovery.
The Horror of Predictability
Predictability is particularly damaging to horror because fear depends upon uncertainty.
Once the audience understands the rhythm, the tension begins to drain away.
We know the Passenger will appear.
We know someone will investigate.
We know the darkness will conceal something.
We know the characters will discover another piece of mythology.
And we know that the next scare is likely to arrive just when the soundtrack becomes suspiciously quiet.
There are still moments that work.
But they become isolated jolts rather than part of a sustained atmosphere of dread.
The film’s strongest scare may actually be its opening because, at that point, Passenger hasn’t yet told us what kind of film it is.
It simply lets us be afraid.
A Film Out of Time
Perhaps the strangest thing about Passenger is how contemporary its premise feels and how familiar its execution feels.
The horror landscape has become increasingly adventurous in recent years, with filmmakers finding fresh ways to approach supernatural folklore, body horror, psychological terror and genre hybridity.
Against that backdrop, Passenger feels unusually conventional.
That doesn’t automatically make a film bad.
There is nothing wrong with making a straightforward supernatural horror movie.
But straightforward doesn’t have to mean predictable.
Passenger occasionally seems satisfied with reproducing horror mechanics that other films have already used more effectively.
Its greatest sin isn’t that it is old-fashioned.
It’s that it doesn’t seem particularly interested in doing anything with being old-fashioned.
A Road Trip That Never Reaches Its Destination
The frustration with Passenger comes down to that central contradiction.
There is so much potential in the premise.
A demonic entity stalking people on America’s lonely highways.
A young couple living permanently on the road.
A vehicle that functions simultaneously as home, refuge and trap.
A folklore of missing travellers and roadside death.
An experienced horror filmmaker behind the camera.
That should be enough to make something memorable.
And there are glimpses of it.
But Passenger gradually abandons its strongest qualities in favour of increasingly familiar supernatural-horror territory.
The highway becomes generic.
The mythology becomes explanatory.
The scares become predictable.
The characters remain underdeveloped.
And the Passenger, who should be the film’s great nightmare invention, becomes increasingly ordinary.
The Prognosis:
Passenger is a disappointing film precisely because André Øvredal has already shown us how much better he can do.
There is real promise in its opening, where the combination of an isolated highway, a mysterious accident and an unseen supernatural presence creates the possibility of a genuinely unsettling road nightmare. For a brief period, the film seems to understand that the most frightening thing about travelling through darkness is not knowing what might be waiting beyond the headlights.
But Passenger cannot resist turning that uncertainty into explanation.
The further it travels, the more predictable the journey becomes.
What could have been a lean, atmospheric supernatural road horror instead becomes a collection of familiar scares and increasingly cumbersome mythology. The film isn’t without craft, and Øvredal occasionally finds an image or sequence capable of reminding us of the filmmaker who gave us The Autopsy of Jane Doe.
Those flashes make the disappointment sharper.
Because the film begins with the promise of a destination worth reaching.
Instead, it spends too much of its journey travelling the same stretch of road.
Passenger isn’t a complete disaster.
It’s something more frustrating.
It’s a horror film with a great road, a promising monster and a director capable of considerably more — and somehow it still manages to feel like we’ve been here before.
The body has always been one of horror’s most reliable battlegrounds. We fear what can enter it, what can escape from it and, perhaps most disturbingly, what it might become when it is no longer entirely under our control. With Saccharine, Australian filmmaker Natalie Erika James takes that anxiety and feeds it through one of contemporary culture’s most persistent obsessions: the desire to change the body into something supposedly better.
Hana is a medical student consumed by dissatisfaction with her weight and appearance. When she encounters an obscure weight-loss craze promising extraordinary results, the temptation proves impossible to resist. The secret ingredient, however, is not some miracle pharmaceutical. It is human ash. And when Hana begins consuming it, she discovers that the dead aren’t necessarily prepared to become part of somebody else’s pursuit of perfection.
What begins as a grotesque diet-culture satire gradually develops into something stranger: a ghost story, a psychological horror film and a piece of body horror that asks how much of ourselves we are prepared to destroy in the pursuit of becoming somebody else.
It is an ambitious premise, and James is an ambitious filmmaker. The result doesn’t always manage to reconcile all of its ideas, but when Saccharine sinks its teeth into its central concerns, it demonstrates exactly why James has become such an interesting voice in Australian horror.
The James Body
Viewed alongside Relic, Saccharine begins to reveal something particularly fascinating about Natalie Erika James as a filmmaker.
These are very different horror films, dealing with very different forms of suffering, yet they are connected by an increasingly recognisable preoccupation: what happens when an internal experience becomes impossible to contain inside the mind and begins to manifest upon the body.
In Relic, that experience is dementia. Edna’s cognitive deterioration becomes increasingly physical, with the house itself seeming to absorb and reproduce the decay taking place within her. Mould spreads across the walls and eventually across Edna’s body, turning the invisible horror of neurological decline into something tangible.
Saccharine takes that same principle and turns it inward.
Hana isn’t losing control of her body because disease has taken it from her. She is attempting to take control of it herself. The horror emerges from the space between those two impulses. She wants to improve herself, to become thinner, more desirable and more acceptable, but the pursuit of that ideal gradually becomes an act of self-erasure.
James has described Saccharine as exploring the thin line between self-improvement and self-erasure, and that distinction provides perhaps the most useful key to understanding her cinema.
Her characters aren’t necessarily confronted by monsters that exist independently of their emotional lives. Instead, horror gives physical form to something they are already carrying.
In Relic, grief, ageing and the terror of watching a loved one disappear become an environment that literally decays around the characters. In Saccharine, shame, hunger and the desire to alter one’s body become a presence that enters Hana from within and gradually assumes control.
The monster is therefore never entirely external.
It is an expression.
From Decay to Self-Erasure
The connection between Relic and Saccharine becomes particularly striking when we consider their attitudes towards the body.
Edna’s body is betraying her.
Hana believes her body is betraying her.
The distinction is enormous, but James approaches both characters with the same fundamental empathy. Neither woman is simply a vessel for a horror metaphor. The supernatural allows James to explore experiences that are difficult to represent literally, while the human being remains at the centre of the film.
That is why the body horror in both films feels more tragic than sensational.
In Relic, the horror lies in the inevitability of deterioration and the helplessness of those watching it happen. In Saccharine, the horror lies in the possibility that the desire to escape dissatisfaction can become another form of destruction.
One woman cannot stop her body changing.
The other cannot stop trying to change hers.
Both are trapped by an increasingly hostile relationship with the physical self.
And in both cases, James makes that psychological imprisonment literal.
The House and the Body
There is also a fascinating architectural connection between the two films.
Relic is inseparable from its house. The building becomes an extension of Edna’s deteriorating mind, with rooms, corridors and walls transforming into expressions of confusion, entrapment and decay. The physical environment becomes a manifestation of the psychological experience.
Saccharine moves that idea into the body.
Hana’s environment still matters, but the primary architecture is now physical. Her body becomes the space through which the horror operates. The film’s medical settings are particularly appropriate because they turn the human form into something that can be examined, measured, dissected and categorised.
That is precisely what Hana is doing to herself.
She has internalised the idea that her body can be treated as a problem to solve.
James simply turns that idea into horror.
The result is a continuation of the spatial thinking that made Relic so effective. In both films, characters are trapped inside environments that increasingly reflect their psychological states. The difference is that Relic makes the house feel like a body, while Saccharine makes the body feel like a haunted house.
An Australian Body-Horror Tradition
This makes Saccharine part of a particularly interesting moment in Australian horror.
Australian genre cinema has long had an appetite for the grotesque, but recent years have seen filmmakers increasingly combine physical horror with sophisticated psychological and social themes. The Babadook, Relic, Sissy and Talk to Me are very different films, but each demonstrates the capacity of Australian horror to transform intimate anxieties into something monstrous.
Saccharine comfortably belongs within that tradition.
The horror doesn’t simply arrive from outside.
It grows from something recognisably human.
Hana’s obsession with her body is not an abstract concept. It is connected to the pressures surrounding beauty, desirability, self-worth and the seemingly endless cultural demand to improve ourselves.
James simply pushes those pressures to their most grotesque conclusion.
What if the shortcut actually worked?
What if you could consume something and become thinner almost immediately?
And what if the price of that transformation was another human being?
What Are We Willing to Consume?
The film’s weight-loss substance, Gray, is one of its most inspired concepts.
Initially, it appears almost miraculous. Users lose weight at an extraordinary rate, turning the fantasy of effortless transformation into reality.
But Hana is a medical student.
She investigates.
And what she discovers is horrifying.
The substance is human ash.
At that moment, Saccharine reveals its most deliciously perverse idea. The modern miracle cure isn’t some futuristic invention. It is simply death repackaged as a consumer product.
The body that society has taught Hana to despise can apparently be transformed through the consumption of another body.
It is cannibalism disguised as wellness.
And the more Hana understands about Gray, the further she is prepared to go to continue using it.
James is at her strongest when she allows this idea to speak for itself. She doesn’t need to explain the metaphor because the metaphor is already horrifying.
We have simply taken the language of dieting and pushed it into nightmare territory.
The Dead Fight Back
The film’s second major idea arrives when Hana begins to realise that the human remains she is consuming belonged to someone.
That someone does not necessarily appreciate what has happened.
The resulting ghost story gives Saccharine another layer of unease. Hana isn’t merely haunted because she has violated some supernatural rule. She is being confronted by the humanity she has tried to reduce to an ingredient.
The ghost becomes a physical manifestation of the moral consequence of Hana’s obsession.
The dead woman is no longer simply a body.
She is a person.
That distinction becomes increasingly important.
The more Hana becomes obsessed with changing herself, the more she begins to lose sight of the humanity of other people. The haunting therefore isn’t simply punishment.
It is confrontation.
Midori Francis’ Hana
Midori Francis carries much of the film’s emotional weight.
Hana could easily have become an unpleasant protagonist. Her decisions become increasingly disturbing, and her obsession leads her into ethically appalling territory. Yet Francis gives her enough vulnerability to make those choices comprehensible without excusing them.
There is desperation beneath the vanity.
There is loneliness beneath the obsession.
And there is an almost tragic belief that if Hana can simply fix her body, the rest of her life will somehow fall into place.
Francis understands that contradiction.
Hana knows that what she is doing is wrong.
She continues anyway.
That is much more interesting than a protagonist who simply doesn’t understand the consequences of her actions.
Her intelligence becomes part of the tragedy. She has enough medical knowledge to understand exactly what is happening, but knowledge cannot overcome obsession.
The Anatomy of Horror
James’ visual confidence is particularly evident in the way she treats the human body.
The medical environment provides an appropriately clinical backdrop. Bodies are dissected, examined and categorised. Human remains become objects of scientific study.
Then the film gradually turns those same bodies into objects of desire and consumption.
The clinical becomes corporeal.
The corporeal becomes edible.
The edible becomes supernatural.
James repeatedly finds ways of making the human body appear simultaneously fascinating and disgusting. Flesh, organs and food begin to occupy the same visual territory.
This is where Saccharine demonstrates some of its greatest confidence.
Body horror doesn’t necessarily require mutilation.
Sometimes the most disturbing image is something completely ordinary presented from the wrong perspective.
A meal becomes grotesque.
A body becomes food.
Food becomes flesh.
And the distinction between nourishment and destruction begins to disappear.
The Beautiful and the Grotesque
James’ visual evolution between Relic and Saccharine is equally revealing.
Relic is dominated by oppressive darkness, Gothic architecture, mould, shadow and gradual decay. Saccharine initially appears almost to reject that visual language. Its colours are brighter, its surfaces more artificial and its imagery more tactile.
But the underlying philosophy is remarkably similar.
James has spoken about wanting Saccharine to occupy a space between “candy and grime” — the artificial sweetness of pleasure alongside the physical rot underneath it.
That tension is central to her work.
The beautiful and the grotesque are never entirely separate.
In Relic, the family home contains both memories of love and the horror of deterioration. In Saccharine, the promise of beauty and self-improvement contains the possibility of self-destruction.
James seems instinctively drawn to the point where attraction becomes repulsion.
Something is beautiful because we desire it.
Something is horrifying because we understand what that desire can cost.
That is a sophisticated foundation for body horror.
A Ghost Story Inside a Body-Horror Film
The film’s most interesting structural decision is also one of its weaknesses.
James is essentially making two horror films at once.
One is a body-horror story about eating, weight loss and the desire to transform the physical self.
The other is a supernatural ghost story about a dead woman whose body has been violated and whose presence begins to haunt the person responsible.
Individually, both ideas are compelling.
Together, they don’t always fit comfortably.
The ghost story occasionally threatens to pull the film away from its strongest material. Just as the body-horror metaphor begins to bite, the narrative shifts towards more conventional supernatural mechanics.
This doesn’t make those sequences ineffective, but they are less distinctive.
James is at her best when the supernatural and physical become indistinguishable — when we aren’t quite sure whether Hana is being haunted by a ghost, by her own guilt or by the increasingly distorted relationship she has with her body.
The more conventional the haunting becomes, the less interesting the film feels.
When the Metaphor Starts Showing
There is no great subtlety to Saccharine.
That isn’t necessarily a criticism. Horror has always been capable of taking social anxieties and turning them into grotesque literalism.
James understands that the metaphor becomes more powerful when it becomes physically impossible to ignore.
But there are moments when the film explains what its imagery has already communicated.
We understand what Hana is experiencing.
We understand why she wants to change.
We understand the destructive nature of the culture surrounding her.
The film occasionally continues explaining after the horror has already made the point.
This becomes more noticeable as the narrative progresses. The film’s second half doesn’t always maintain the intensity established by its opening sections.
The irony is that the repetition has a thematic logic.
Obsession is repetitive.
The same thought returns.
The same ritual is repeated.
The same dissatisfaction resurfaces.
But what works psychologically doesn’t always work dramatically.
The Horror of Wanting More
One of the film’s strongest ideas is that Hana never reaches a point at which enough is enough.
The first transformation isn’t sufficient.
The next one isn’t sufficient.
The goal moves.
The body changes.
The dissatisfaction remains.
This is perhaps the most disturbing aspect of Saccharine because it doesn’t require a supernatural explanation.
The promise of perfection is inherently unstable.
There is always another flaw.
Another kilogram.
Another improvement.
Another version of ourselves waiting to be manufactured.
Hana’s horror comes from discovering that the thing she believes will finally make her happy has no finish line.
The body can always be changed.
The appetite can always return.
The obsession can always demand more.
The Horror of Self-Erasure
This is where Saccharine most clearly extends the ideas of Relic.
Edna’s body is being taken away from her.
Hana is voluntarily giving hers away.
The first is a horror of inevitable deterioration. The second is a horror of chosen transformation.
Yet both films ultimately arrive at a similar question:
What happens when the body ceases to feel like home?
James doesn’t provide an easy answer because neither film is really interested in easy answers.
Instead, she uses horror to make psychological experiences physical.
In Relic, decay becomes architecture.
In Saccharine, insecurity becomes consumption.
In both films, the body becomes the place where emotional and psychological damage can no longer remain invisible.
That may ultimately be the defining characteristic of James’ cinema.
She doesn’t use horror to escape reality.
She uses horror to make reality impossible to ignore.
The Australian Body-Horror Renaissance
There is something particularly encouraging about Saccharine existing within the current Australian horror landscape.
The country has always produced filmmakers willing to confront the grotesque, but there is now a remarkable confidence in Australian genre cinema’s ability to explore serious emotional and social issues through horror.
Saccharine doesn’t merely want us to recoil.
It wants the recoil to mean something.
The body becomes the battleground where social pressure, personal insecurity, desire, grief and guilt collide.
That makes James’ work part of a broader Australian horror tradition that treats genre as a means of examining the things we might otherwise find difficult to discuss directly.
And James is clearly developing a visual language of her own.
There is a confidence here that goes beyond the script’s occasional structural uncertainty.
A Film That Bites, But Doesn’t Always Chew
The frustrating thing about Saccharine is that its best ideas are genuinely excellent.
The concept of a weight-loss drug made from human ashes is inspired.
The collision of body horror and ghost story is fertile territory.
The Australian setting gives it a distinct identity.
Midori Francis is compelling.
And James has an instinct for visual horror that remains impressive.
But the film sometimes feels like it is carrying too many ideas at once.
The social commentary wants to be sharp.
The ghost story wants to be frightening.
The body horror wants to be disgusting.
The character drama wants to be emotional.
The romantic material wants to give Hana something to desire.
And the family material wants to explain where her relationship with her body originated.
Some of these elements complement one another beautifully.
Others simply compete for attention.
The result is a film that is frequently fascinating without always being completely satisfying.
The Prognosis:
Saccharine is an ambitious Australian horror film that deserves credit for taking a genuinely grotesque premise and using it to interrogate something far more familiar: our complicated relationship with our own bodies.
Natalie Erika James remains an assured visual filmmaker, and Saccharine confirms that the concerns emerging from Relic were not simply the product of a singular premise. There is a developing body of work here, one increasingly concerned with the physical manifestation of internal suffering.
Relic asked us to confront the horror of watching a body and mind deteriorate.
Saccharine asks us to confront the horror of desperately trying to prevent that body from being what it is.
One woman cannot stop herself changing.
The other cannot stop trying to change herself.
Both become trapped inside bodies that no longer feel like their own.
That continuity makes Saccharine more interesting than its individual successes and shortcomings might suggest. It establishes James as a filmmaker fascinated by the point at which psychological suffering crosses the threshold into physical horror.
The film doesn’t always achieve the devastating impact its premise promises. Its supernatural elements occasionally feel more conventional than its body-horror ideas, and its thematic commentary can sometimes become too explicit.
But there is enough ambition, imagination and outright grotesquerie here to make the film worthwhile.
James has created a horror story in which appetite becomes addiction, transformation becomes self-destruction and the dead refuse to remain reduced to ingredients.
It doesn’t always digest its ideas cleanly.
But when Saccharine sinks its teeth into its subject, it does so with considerable force.
And in an Australian horror landscape increasingly willing to make the body its canvas, that is something worth celebrating.
Relic made the house feel like a body.
Saccharine makes the body feel like a haunted house.
The next question is what James will choose to haunt.
Surgeons of Horror 