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The Slow Rot of Truth: We Bury the Dead (2024)

11 Wednesday Mar 2026

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Zombie cinema has rarely been short of metaphors. From consumerism to social collapse, the living dead have long functioned as mirrors reflecting humanity’s anxieties back at itself. In We Bury the Dead, Australian filmmaker Zak Hilditch approaches the genre from a quieter, more introspective angle, delivering a film that is less concerned with apocalyptic spectacle and more invested in the emotional wreckage left behind when the world stops making sense.

Following the critical success of his Stephen King adaptation 1922, Hilditch once again demonstrates a fascination with grief, guilt and moral ambiguity. Where many zombie films focus on the chaos of the outbreak itself, We Bury the Dead situates its narrative in the uneasy aftermath — a world where the catastrophe has already occurred and society is struggling to process what comes next.

The premise is deceptively straightforward. After a military experiment goes catastrophically wrong, large portions of the population are left dead… or something close to it. The government attempts to contain the situation by declaring the reanimated victims harmless and slow-moving, encouraging volunteers to enter quarantined zones to recover bodies and offer closure to grieving families. It is an oddly bureaucratic approach to the apocalypse — one that immediately hints at deeper layers of deception.

Enter Ava, portrayed with steely determination by Daisy Ridley. Driven by the possibility that her missing husband might still be found within the restricted zone, Ava volunteers to join the clean-up effort. What begins as a mission rooted in grief soon transforms into a descent into a landscape where the official narrative begins to unravel.

Because the dead, it seems, are not as harmless as the military would like the public to believe.

Grief at the End of the World

At its heart, We Bury the Dead is not really about zombies. Instead, it is about the human inability to accept loss.

Hilditch structures the film almost like a road movie through the ruins of a broken society. Ava’s journey through quarantined territories becomes a physical manifestation of grief itself — a search for answers that may never come, fuelled by the stubborn hope that closure might still be possible.

The film repeatedly asks a troubling question: if the dead returned, even briefly, would we really want to let them go again?

This thematic focus places the film closer to reflective entries in the genre such as The Girl with All the Gifts or 28 Days Later, where the apocalypse becomes a canvas for exploring the emotional cost of survival rather than simply a playground for gore.

A Different Kind of Undead

The film’s interpretation of the undead also deserves mention. Rather than the traditional shambling hordes popularised by George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, Hilditch presents a more ambiguous threat.

Initially passive, the reanimated bodies appear almost dormant — eerily calm, as if waiting. But as Ava moves deeper into the quarantine zone, something begins to shift. The dead become restless, unpredictable, increasingly aggressive.

The slow escalation works effectively because Hilditch refuses to rush it. The horror creeps in gradually, allowing the tension to build organically rather than relying on sudden bursts of violence.

This patient pacing will not satisfy viewers looking for relentless zombie carnage, but it serves the film’s more contemplative ambitions well.

Atmosphere Over Spectacle

Visually, We Bury the Dead leans heavily into desolation. The quarantined landscapes feel eerily still, drained of life and colour. Roads stretch endlessly through abandoned territories while small settlements sit frozen in time, as though the world simply stopped functioning mid-sentence.

The result is an atmosphere that feels closer to post-apocalyptic melancholy than traditional horror.

Hilditch has always shown a strong sense of visual restraint, and that restraint works largely in the film’s favour. The horror rarely comes from the monsters themselves but from the creeping realisation that the official narrative surrounding the disaster may be deliberately misleading.

In other words, the true threat may not be the dead — but the living who are trying to control the story.

A Thoughtful Entry in a Crowded Genre

While We Bury the Dead occasionally struggles with pacing — its deliberate tempo can at times feel slightly overextended — the film’s emotional depth helps it rise above many of its genre contemporaries.

Ridley anchors the story with a performance grounded in determination and vulnerability, carrying the film through its quieter moments of reflection and uncertainty. Her journey is less about survival than about acceptance — the painful process of realising that some answers simply cannot bring comfort.

In a genre often dominated by chaos and carnage, We Bury the Dead chooses a more sombre path.

It’s a zombie film about mourning.

And in that quiet, reflective approach, Zak Hilditch finds something unexpectedly powerful.

The Prognosis:

A thoughtful, grief-stricken take on the undead mythos that favours atmosphere and emotional weight over relentless action.

  • Saul Muerte

Watching the Watchers: Bodycam (2026)

11 Wednesday Mar 2026

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The found-footage format has long been one of horror’s most effective narrative devices. When done well, it places audiences directly inside the unfolding terror, collapsing the distance between viewer and victim. Yet it’s also a subgenre littered with misfires, where shaky cameras and contrived setups often undermine the illusion of authenticity. Bodycam, the latest Shudder Original from Canadian filmmaker Brandon Christensen, sits somewhere between those two extremes — a competent genre exercise that understands the mechanics of found-footage horror, even if it doesn’t entirely reinvent them.

Christensen has quietly carved out a niche within contemporary supernatural horror. His earlier films, particularly Still/Born and Superhost, demonstrated a knack for building tension through confined spaces and psychological unease. With Bodycam, he expands that approach into a story rooted in modern surveillance culture, using the now-familiar lens of police body cameras to frame a tale where guilt, paranoia, and something far more sinister begin to blur together.

The premise is deceptively simple. Two police officers respond to what initially appears to be a routine domestic disturbance call. When the situation spirals into a tragic accident, the pair make a desperate decision to conceal the truth, fearing the consequences of public scrutiny and institutional fallout. Yet as they attempt to rewrite the narrative, they begin to realise that the technology designed to document the truth may not be the only witness present.

And perhaps something else is recording.

Christensen leans heavily into the aesthetics of surveillance — dashboard cameras, bodycam footage, and fragments of security recordings stitched together to tell the story. This multi-camera structure echoes the fragmented style seen in genre landmarks like The Blair Witch Project, Paranormal Activity, and REC, all of which demonstrated how technological mediation can heighten a sense of realism. The trick, however, lies in convincing audiences that every camera angle exists for a plausible reason — one of the classic “dos and don’ts” of found-footage filmmaking.

To Christensen’s credit, Bodycam largely understands those rules. The body camera format itself naturally justifies the constant presence of a recording device, avoiding the common genre pitfall where characters inexplicably continue filming while their lives are clearly in danger. The immediacy of the footage lends several scenes a raw intensity, particularly when the supernatural elements begin to bleed into the frame in subtle, fleeting glimpses.

Where the film falters slightly is in its reliance on familiar beats. The escalating paranoia, the creeping suggestion that unseen forces are manipulating events, and the eventual collision between guilt and supernatural consequence follow a trajectory that seasoned horror audiences will likely recognise. Christensen proves adept at staging tension, but the narrative rarely deviates far from the established playbook.

Still, the film’s thematic core gives it an added layer of intrigue. By centring the story on police officers attempting to hide a mistake, Bodycam taps into contemporary anxieties surrounding accountability, surveillance, and the uncomfortable reality that technology can both reveal and obscure the truth. The idea that the cameras designed to protect authority figures might ultimately condemn them adds an unsettling moral dimension to the proceedings.

Visually, the film embraces the claustrophobic aesthetic that Christensen has proven comfortable with throughout his career. Much like Superhost, the tension builds through confined environments and a slow tightening of psychological pressure. Darkness becomes a character in its own right, with the limited field of vision offered by the body cameras forcing viewers to search every corner of the frame for signs of what might be lurking just outside the light.

As with many entries in the found-footage canon, the film’s success ultimately depends on how much patience audiences have for the format’s limitations. Shaky visuals, fragmented storytelling, and a reliance on atmosphere over spectacle are all part of the package.

For fans of the subgenre, Bodycam offers a solid if familiar addition to the catalogue — a tense supernatural thriller that understands the rules of the game without necessarily rewriting them.

The Prognosis:

A competent found-footage chiller that proves Brandon Christensen knows how to work within the genre’s framework, even if he occasionally plays it a little too safe.

  • Saul Muerte

Bodycam streams on Shudder from Fri 13 Mar

The Cruel Game of Belonging: The Plague (2025)

10 Tuesday Mar 2026

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Few environments can be as quietly brutal as a group of adolescent boys left to navigate the fragile space between childhood and adulthood. The Plague, the feature debut from writer-director Charlie Polinger, taps into that unsettling social ecosystem with an unnerving sense of authenticity, crafting a coming-of-age drama that plays like a slow-burn psychological horror.

Set against the competitive backdrop of a boys’ water polo camp in the summer of 2003, the film follows twelve-year-old Ben as he attempts to integrate into the camp’s unforgiving social order. Everett Blunck captures the unease of a boy desperate for acceptance, only to find himself pulled into the group’s cruel fixation on Eli — an isolated camper whom the others brand as contagious, referring to him with chilling simplicity as “The Plague.”

What begins as childish teasing slowly reveals itself to be something far more disturbing.

A Study in Toxic Masculinity

Polinger’s film isn’t interested in conventional horror tropes. Instead, the true terror lies in the social dynamics of the boys themselves. Within this tightly wound, male-dominated environment, power is established through humiliation, conformity and cruelty.

The film scrutinises the early formation of toxic masculinity with uncomfortable precision. Strength is equated with dominance. Vulnerability becomes a weakness to be mocked or punished. And the desire to belong — particularly at such a fragile age — becomes a powerful motivator for moral compromise.

Ben’s gradual complicity in the torment of Eli becomes the film’s central tragedy. The cruelty isn’t born from malice so much as fear: fear of exclusion, fear of being the next target, fear of standing apart from the pack.

It’s an unsettling reminder that the pressures of social acceptance can be just as dangerous as outright hostility.

The Horror of Adolescence

Polinger frames the story almost like a psychological fable about adolescence. The rumour of “The Plague” itself operates less as a literal illness and more as a metaphor — a childish myth that allows the boys to rationalise their behaviour while maintaining the illusion of innocence.

The film’s atmosphere subtly leans into genre territory. Long stretches of uneasy silence, tense glances between characters and the oppressive heat of the summer camp create a creeping sense of dread. At times it feels closer to social horror than traditional drama, echoing the uncomfortable emotional territory explored in films like Carrie and Raw.

The difference here is that the monsters are not supernatural — they’re simply boys learning the wrong lessons about what it means to become men.

A Strong Ensemble of Young Performers

Much of the film’s effectiveness comes from its young cast, who bring a naturalistic authenticity to the story. Everett Blunck anchors the film with a quietly affecting performance as Ben, capturing the anxiety and moral confusion of a boy desperate to fit in.

Opposite him, Kenny Rasmussen’s Eli becomes the film’s emotional centre — a painfully believable portrait of the outsider whose difference makes him an easy target.

Meanwhile Joel Edgerton, appearing as the camp authority figure “Daddy Wags,” adds an intriguing layer to the dynamic, embodying the distant adult presence that looms over the boys’ social ecosystem without ever fully understanding it.

A Telling and Timely Reflection

At its core, The Plague is less about childhood cruelty and more about the systems that quietly nurture it. The film exposes the unspoken rules that shape male identity from a young age — rules that reward aggression, punish empathy and demand conformity at all costs.

It’s a telling and topical story, particularly in an era increasingly willing to interrogate the cultural roots of toxic masculinity.

While the film occasionally lingers too long in its quieter moments, its thematic weight and strong performances ultimately make it a compelling and thought-provoking watch.

The Prognosis:

An uncomfortable yet insightful exploration of peer pressure, masculinity, and the terrifying cost of wanting to belong.

  • Saul Muerte

The Plague will be screening in Australian cinemas from Mar 12.

Spirals Into the Screen: OBEX and the Dream Logic of Digital Worlds

07 Saturday Mar 2026

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In an era where video game movies usually chase blockbuster spectacle, OBEX heads defiantly in the opposite direction. Written, directed by, and starring Albert Birney, the film is a surreal, low-fi fantasy that feels less like a conventional adventure and more like a fever dream about loneliness, digital escapism, and the strange places our minds wander when reality becomes unbearable.

Fans of Birney’s earlier cult oddity Strawberry Mansion will recognize the sensibility immediately: handmade visuals, melancholy humour, and a fascination with the porous boundary between imagination and waking life.

A Quest That Begins With Loss

Birney plays Conor, a thirty-something recluse whose existence is almost entirely mediated through a computer screen. His two anchors are video games and his beloved dog Sandy. When Sandy mysteriously disappears, the loss shatters the fragile routine that defines Conor’s life. His search leads him somewhere unexpected — into the very game he has been obsessively playing.

The titular game, OBEX, becomes both portal and psychological mirror. To rescue Sandy, Conor must traverse its strange landscapes and confront a demon named Ixaroth, but the journey is less about heroic triumph than existential unraveling.

Like many of the film’s most effective moments, the premise works metaphorically: the game world is not merely a fantasy environment but a projection of Conor’s inner life.

Early Lynchian Echoes

There’s an unmistakably David Lynch-adjacent energy to the film’s tone — particularly the director’s early work, where narrative coherence often gives way to texture and mood. OBEX embraces dream logic. Scenes drift in and out of one another. Dialogue occasionally feels like fragments of a half-remembered conversation. Objects carry an eerie symbolic weight.

The aesthetic reinforces this atmosphere. Birney favours tactile, lo-fi visual effects and handmade set pieces that feel closer to experimental art installation than mainstream fantasy cinema. The game environments have the uncanny texture of forgotten 1990s PC graphics filtered through a surrealist lens.

Rather than striving for realism, OBEX leans into artificiality — and in doing so creates something oddly hypnotic.

Gamification as Psychological Descent

Where OBEX becomes particularly interesting is in its use of gaming mechanics as narrative structure. Levels, quests, and encounters mirror Conor’s emotional state. Progression through the game doesn’t feel triumphant; it feels obsessive, as if he’s spiraling deeper into a digital labyrinth.

This gamified framework also becomes commentary on escapism. Conor retreats into OBEX not just to save Sandy but to avoid confronting the emptiness of his real life. The deeper he goes, the less clear the boundaries between player and character become.

The film never fully explains the metaphysics of its world — wisely so. OBEX functions best when experienced as a symbolic landscape rather than a literal one.

Sound, Texture and Handmade Weirdness

Adding to the film’s dreamlike texture is its score, recorded by Josh Dibb, founding member of Animal Collective. The music drifts between ambient melancholy and eerie electronic pulses, giving the film a sonic identity that feels both nostalgic and otherworldly.

Combined with Birney’s deliberately rough visual style, the soundtrack enhances the sensation that OBEX exists somewhere between retro gaming nostalgia and avant-garde fantasy.

A Strange but Compelling Indie Journey

OBEX won’t be for everyone. Its narrative can feel deliberately opaque, and viewers expecting a traditional fantasy adventure may find themselves disoriented by its meandering dream logic. Yet that same refusal to conform is also its greatest strength.

Birney has crafted something personal, odd, and unmistakably independent — a film that feels like it emerged from the margins of cinema rather than its mainstream centre.

OBEX stands as an intriguing curiosity: a surreal digital odyssey that captures the strange emotional gravity of games, memory, and loneliness.

And like any good quest, it leaves you wondering whether the real journey happened inside the screen — or inside the player.

  • Saul Muerte

Words That Wound: Crazy Old Lady and Argentina’s New Wave of Psychological Horror

26 Thursday Feb 2026

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Premiering exclusively on Shudder and AMC+ on 27 February, Crazy Old Lady arrives at a moment when Argentine horror is no longer a niche curiosity but a steadily rising force within global genre cinema. Directed by Martín Mauregui, the film won Best Director in the Horror Competition at Fantastic Fest and screened at the Sitges Film Festival, signaling its pedigree within the festival circuit.

Argentina’s Expanding Horror Identity

Over the past decade, Argentine horror has carved out a distinct tonal space — one steeped in psychological dread, moral decay, and socio-political unease. Films like Terrified (Aterrados) and When Evil Lurks, both from Demián Rugna, have demonstrated a willingness to confront spiritual rot with startling brutality. Meanwhile, works such as The Last Matinee have blended nostalgia with escalating carnage.

Crazy Old Lady situates itself within this movement but opts for a more intimate chamber-piece approach. Gone are demonic outbreaks or grand supernatural set-pieces. Instead, the horror is confined to a single home — and to a single voice.

The House as a Psychological Trap

The premise is elegantly simple: on a storm-lashed evening, Pedro answers a desperate plea from his ex-girlfriend to watch over her senile mother, Alicia. What begins as reluctant caretaking morphs into entrapment when Alicia refuses to let him leave. From here, Mauregui crafts a claustrophobic duel between youth and decay, autonomy and obligation.

The house becomes less a haunted space than a psychological maze. Doors lock. Power flickers. Corridors stretch under dim lighting. Yet the most unnerving element is Alicia herself.

Generational Trauma as Curse

At its core, Crazy Old Lady explores generational trauma — the emotional inheritance passed down like an heirloom no one wants. Alicia’s ramblings oscillate between fragility and cruelty, revealing buried resentments and manipulative patterns that echo through her daughter and now ensnare Pedro.

The horror lies not only in her sadistic “games,” but in the suggestion that her worldview — her bitterness, her warped moral logic — has already seeped into the next generation. Words linger long after they’re spoken. They calcify. They shape behavior.

Mauregui repeatedly frames Alicia in tight close-ups as she mutters aphorisms that feel both cryptic and venomous. These fragments of speech function almost like incantations, embedding themselves in the atmosphere. In this sense, the film’s haunting is linguistic rather than spectral.

It’s a compelling thematic hook, even if the script occasionally circles its ideas without deepening them.

Mauregui’s Controlled Minimalism

Martín Mauregui directs with restraint, favoring sustained tension over sudden shocks. The pacing is deliberate, sometimes to a fault, but his control of confined space is impressive. The storm outside acts as sonic punctuation, underscoring Pedro’s isolation.

Where the film falters slightly is in escalation. The psychological cat-and-mouse dynamic promises a crescendo of either shocking revelation or cathartic confrontation. Instead, the climax feels muted — more simmer than explosion. For some viewers, this restraint will read as sophistication; for others, as hesitation.

Still, Mauregui’s festival recognition feels justified. There’s a clear authorial voice at work — one attuned to emotional cruelty rather than spectacle.

A Solid Entry in a Strong Movement

Crazy Old Lady may not reach the ferocity of When Evil Lurks or the nerve-shredding intensity of Terrified, but it contributes to the ongoing evolution of Argentine horror by narrowing its focus to the domestic sphere. It suggests that sometimes the most enduring hauntings are not demons or ghosts, but the toxic narratives families pass down through generations.

Not a breakout masterpiece, but another confident step in Argentina’s increasingly compelling horror renaissance.

  • Saul Muerte

Blood in the Water: Killer Whale Goes for the Throat

17 Tuesday Feb 2026

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

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

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

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

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

The Prognosis:

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

  • Saul Muerte

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

Wendigo (2001) and Larry Fessenden’s Quiet Place in American Folk Horror

22 Thursday Jan 2026

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American horror has always struggled with its own mythology.

Where European cinema leans effortlessly into castles, covens, and inherited superstition, American folklore remains fragmented — scattered across Native legend, Puritan fear, frontier violence, and the unresolved guilt of colonisation. Monsters here are rarely elegant. They are born of hunger, cold, isolation, and the uneasy sense that the land itself remembers what we have tried to forget.

Wendigo is one of the rare American horror films that attempts to take that legacy seriously.

Folklore in the Margins

Based on Algonquian legend, the Wendigo is not merely a creature but a concept: a spirit of starvation, greed, and moral collapse, born when humans consume more than they should — flesh, land, or power. It is a monster inseparable from colonial history, ecological dread, and cultural trespass.

Larry Fessenden, ever the scholar of marginal horror, understands this instinctively.

From its opening moments, Wendigo resists the trappings of mainstream genre cinema. There are no easy shocks, no baroque effects, no grand set-pieces. Instead, the film unfolds as a low-key domestic tragedy — a city family retreating to the countryside, bringing with them the casual arrogance of outsiders who believe nature is merely scenery.

When an accidental shooting ignites the film’s chain of events, the horror that follows feels less supernatural than inevitable.

Fessenden’s America

By 2001, Larry Fessenden had already established himself as one of American indie horror’s great caretakers — a filmmaker less interested in spectacle than in preservation. Through films like Habit and his later work on The Last Winter and Depraved, Fessenden has acted as both archivist and advocate for a strain of horror that treats myth as cultural memory rather than genre decoration.

Wendigo fits squarely within that mission.

This is not a film about a monster in the woods so much as a film about trespass: moral, ecological, and cultural. The family’s intrusion into rural space, their careless handling of firearms, their unthinking disruption of local rhythms — all feel like small sins accumulating toward punishment. When the legend of the Wendigo finally surfaces, it feels less like summoning than consequence.

In theory, this is rich terrain.

The Problem of Restraint

In practice, Wendigo struggles to fully embody the power of its own mythology.

Fessenden’s commitment to understatement, while admirable, often becomes a liability. The film withholds too much, too often. The creature remains largely abstract. The rituals feel gestural rather than revelatory. What should accumulate as dread instead drifts into ambiguity.

The central performances are competent but muted, and the domestic drama — meant to ground the supernatural — never quite achieves the emotional density required to make the horror resonate fully. The film gestures toward trauma, guilt, and moral rupture, but rarely pierces them.

When the Wendigo finally asserts itself, the moment feels conceptually powerful but cinematically undernourished.

Indie Horror as Preservation

And yet, to judge Wendigo purely by conventional standards would be to misunderstand its place in the larger ecosystem of American horror.

This is not exploitation. It is not entertainment-first. It is an act of cultural stewardship.

Fessenden belongs to a lineage of American indie filmmakers — alongside figures like Kelly Reichardt (in her own register), Jim Mickle, and later Robert Eggers — who treat landscape as archive and myth as history. He is less concerned with thrills than with keeping endangered stories alive, even when their cinematic translation proves imperfect.

In that sense, Wendigo is less a failure than a partial success: a film that reaches for something rare in American horror, even if it cannot quite grasp it.

The Prognosis:

Wendigo remains a fascinating but flawed entry in the canon of American folk horror.

It lacks the visceral impact of its European cousins, and the narrative control to fully harness its mythology. But it compensates with sincerity, scholarship, and a genuine respect for the dark stories embedded in American soil.

Some myths refuse to die.

Even when poorly told, they continue to haunt — not because they are frightening, but because they are true.

  • Saul Muerte

Troll (1986) and the Curious Curse of John Carl Buechler

21 Wednesday Jan 2026

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There are cult films, and then there are accidents of cinema — features that achieve immortality not through design, but through coincidence, misreading, and sheer historical mischief. Troll (1986) belongs squarely in the latter category: a film remembered less for what it is than for what it accidentally prefigured, misinspired, and became associated with long after its modest ambitions had curdled into kitsch.

And yet, behind the latex ears and ill-fated wizardry stands a filmmaker worth far more respect than this film’s reputation allows.

The Craftsman Behind the Curtain

John Carl Buechler remains one of genre cinema’s great unsung artisans. A gifted special effects designer who helped shape the tactile horrors of Friday the 13th Part VII, Re-Animator, and countless exploitation staples, Buechler belonged to that dying breed of filmmakers who understood monsters as objects — sculpted, painted, and animated by hand.

Troll was his directorial debut, and it bears all the marks of a craftsman promoted too quickly to magician.

There is, undeniably, a handmade charm to the film. The practical effects — crude as they are — possess a sincerity now absent from much digital fantasy. The creatures are physical. The makeup is tangible. You can see the fingerprints of labour in every prosthetic and puppet. But good intentions, sadly, do not summon good storytelling.

The Myth of the Boy Wizard

It is impossible to discuss Troll without addressing the elephant — or rather, the bespectacled boy — in the room.

Long before Hogwarts, long before J.K. Rowling, this film introduced a young protagonist named Harry Potter. The coincidence is so outrageous it has since become the film’s primary cultural legacy. The connection is legally irrelevant, narratively meaningless, and yet historically irresistible. In hindsight, Troll reads like a bootleg prophecy — a cheap VHS oracle accidentally whispering a name that would one day dominate popular culture.

Of course, this Harry Potter is no chosen one. He is a bland, passive child adrift in a narrative that barely knows what to do with him. Magic here is not destiny, but disorder — a grab bag of spells, potions, and goblin politics that never cohere into a convincing mythology.

What remains is not mythology, but meme.

Band, Bono & B-Movie Business

As ever, hovering behind the chaos is Charles Band, Full Moon’s impresario of low-budget fantasy and high-concept nonsense. His influence is everywhere: the tonal instability, the commercial opportunism, the sense that the film is less telling a story than testing a product line.

Troll feels engineered less as a film than as a franchise prototype — a world to be exploited, sequelised, and merchandised. That it eventually spawned the infamously unrelated Troll 2 only underlines how little creative coherence existed at the foundation.

Adding to the oddity is the presence of Sonny Bono, whose performance is less acting than cameo-as-curiosity. He drifts through the film like a misplaced sitcom ghost, never fully belonging to the fantasy world around him, and inadvertently reinforcing the film’s tonal confusion.

And then there is Julia Louis-Dreyfus, in an early role that serves primarily as historical footnote. She is capable, charming, and completely underserved — a future comedic titan trapped in a film that barely knows what to do with its own plot, let alone its supporting cast.

A Film at War with Itself

The central problem with Troll is not its budget, nor its effects, nor even its camp. It is its profound indecision.

Is this a children’s fantasy? A horror film? A family comedy? A supernatural soap opera? The film answers “yes” to all, and commits fully to none. Scenes of possession and body horror sit awkwardly beside slapstick and sitcom rhythms. Threat never coheres. Stakes never settle. Even Torok, the film’s central antagonist, oscillates between menace and pantomime.

What emerges is not a failed epic, but a confused one — a film whose imagination outpaces its discipline.

The Legacy of a Miscast Spell

Troll survives not as cinema, but as artifact.

It is remembered because of a name, not a narrative. Because of a sequel, not a success. Because of careers that outgrew it, not because it nurtured them. And yet, within its rubbery frame, there remains a faint trace of Buechler’s genuine love for monsters — a craftsman trying, unsuccessfully, to become a storyteller.

In the end, Troll is less a film than a cautionary tale: about promotion before preparation, about concept without control, about how even the most gifted monster-makers can be undone by a story that refuses to behave.

The Prognosis:

A curiosity. A footnote. A miscast spell that, by sheer accident, echoes through pop culture far louder than it ever deserved.

  • Saul Muerte

Mother of Flies (2025) and the Fragile Alchemy of Family-Made Folk Horror

19 Monday Jan 2026

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There is something inherently seductive about family-made cinema. Not merely collaborative, not simply economical, but almost ritualistic in nature — as if filmmaking itself becomes a shared incantation passed between bloodlines. Few modern genre outfits embody this notion more fiercely than the Adams family. With Hellbender, they didn’t just announce themselves; they howled their arrival, carving a space within contemporary folk horror that felt raw, feral, and authentically unpolished.

Mother of Flies, however, arrives burdened by that legacy — and perhaps undone by it.

Horror in the Blood

John Adams, Toby Poser, and Zelda Adams have, across their work, demonstrated a fascination with witchcraft, bodily sacrifice, inherited trauma, and the occult as something lived-in rather than merely aesthetic. Their films feel less written than unearthed, less scripted than summoned. In Hellbender, this approach reached its most potent expression: a coming-of-age tale steeped in pagan fury, where mother-daughter dynamics merged seamlessly with mythic inheritance. It felt dangerous. It felt discovered.

That sense of discovery is precisely what Mother of Flies struggles to replicate.

Once again, the Adams family retreat into the woods, this time following a young woman seeking salvation from a terminal diagnosis through dark magic and the guidance of a reclusive witch. It is fertile soil for their obsessions — body, ritual, desperation, the cost of power — yet the film rarely sinks its claws into them with conviction.

A Spell Half-Cast

Where Hellbender burned fast and bright, Mother of Flies smoulders — often beautifully, but frustratingly without ignition.

Atmospherically, the film remains tactile and sincere. There is a genuine commitment to texture here: the forest breathes, the rituals feel weighty, the blood not merely decorative but symbolic. The Adams family’s sincerity is never in question — they are filmmakers who believe deeply in what they are conjuring, and that faith lends the film moments of eerie gravitas.

Yet structurally, the film meanders far too long through its incantations, circling its themes without ever quite piercing them. Scenes linger where they should tighten. Symbolism repeats where it should escalate. What begins as hypnotic gradually becomes inert.

It is only in the final act — when consequences are finally allowed to surface — that Mother of Flies truly stirs. Here, the Adams family remind us of their potency: horror not as spectacle, but as reckoning. Unfortunately, by then, the film has already tested the audience’s patience too severely.

The Problem of Inherited Myth

This raises a more curious question about family-made horror itself.

There is something uniquely powerful about horror crafted by those bound not only by contracts, but by blood. Shared history allows shorthand storytelling. It encourages risk. It produces mythology that feels intimate rather than manufactured. We see echoes of this in other sibling or bloodline creatives — the Phillippou Brothers’ ferocious Talk To Me, even the generational echoes of Cronenbergian body horror.

But such intimacy comes with its own danger: when mythology becomes inherited rather than earned, ritual risks becoming repetition. Aesthetic replaces terror. Gesture replaces consequence.

Mother of Flies occasionally feels like the Adams family performing their own mythology, rather than discovering something new within it.

The Fragility of Folk Horror

Folk horror thrives on the illusion of something uncovered — an ancient story clawed from the soil rather than assembled in post-production. Once codified, once too self-aware, it becomes perilously close to costumed reverence. Hellbender felt dangerous because it seemed accidental, like lightning captured in a bottle. Mother of Flies feels careful by comparison — reverent, controlled, and therefore less frightening.

This does not make it a failure, but it does make it a frustrating experience — one brimming with potential, sincerity, and visual mood, yet restrained by its own solemnity.

Still Watching the Woods

Mother of Flies ultimately lands as a disappointment — not because it lacks craft or ambition, but because it fails to evolve the dark language the Adams family once spoke so fluently. And yet, to dismiss it outright would be to misunderstand its place in the larger arc of their work.

The Adams family remain one of indie horror’s most compelling bloodlines. Even in misstep, they conjure worlds few others dare to inhabit so sincerely. In a genre obsessed with inheritance, curses, and legacy, that alone keeps them worth following — back into the woods, back toward the firelight, back toward whatever spell they choose to cast next.

  • Saul Muerte

Mother of Flies is available to stream on Shudder from Fri 23rd Jan.

Link (1986) — When Intelligence Turns Hostile

08 Thursday Jan 2026

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Released in the mid-1980s, when natural horror and animal-attack films were enjoying a second life on VHS and late-night television, Link occupies an unusual and often overlooked position within the killer ape subgenre. Directed by Richard Franklin—best known for his Hitchcockian leanings and his brief but curious detour into franchise horror with Psycho II—the film is less interested in primal savagery than in the unnerving implications of intelligence, hierarchy, and control.

The setup flirts with eccentricity. Graduate student Jane Chase arrives at the isolated home of an ageing zoology professor, only to discover that the household hierarchy has already been rewritten. The professor’s chimpanzees operate with eerie autonomy, while Link, an elderly orangutan dressed and treated like a gentleman’s butler, observes quietly from the margins. When one chimp is found dead and the professor vanishes, Franklin slowly inverts the power dynamic. Jane is no longer studying behaviour—she is subject to it.

Franklin directs Link with a measured, classical restraint that sets it apart from the more exploitative entries in the killer ape cycle. There is little in the way of sensational gore or overt shock tactics. Instead, tension is built through framing, pacing, and a creeping sense of domestic invasion. The house becomes a laboratory, and Jane its most vulnerable test subject. The horror emerges not from sudden violence but from the dawning realisation that the apes understand far more than they should—and may be capable of resentment, planning, and cruelty.

Elisabeth Shue, still early in her career, delivers a performance that anchors the film’s escalating unease. Her Jane is intelligent and resourceful, but never impervious. Shue excels at conveying fear through restraint, allowing the terror to register in hesitation and watchfulness rather than outright hysteria. It’s a performance that would foreshadow her later genre credibility, grounding increasingly absurd situations in emotional reality.

Terence Stamp, meanwhile, brings an off-kilter gravitas to the role of the eccentric professor. Though his screen time is limited, his presence lingers over the film, lending it an air of intellectual arrogance and ethical negligence. Stamp embodies a familiar horror archetype: the man of science who mistakes authority for control, and curiosity for dominion. His disappearance feels less like a mystery than an inevitability.

Within the broader killer ape genre, Link sits closer to Monkey Shines than to more bombastic entries like Congo or Rampage. This is not a film about nature striking back in spectacular fashion, nor is it interested in giant monsters or environmental collapse. Instead, Link taps into a subtler fear—the idea that intelligence, once nurtured and confined, may turn possessive and violent when its boundaries are tested.

When Apes Strike Back: A Brief, Bloody History of Killer Ape Cinema

That said, the film is not without its shortcomings. The third act leans into melodrama, and the film’s central conceit occasionally strains credulity. The mechanics of ape behaviour are pushed beyond plausibility, and some of the symbolism—particularly around class, servitude, and dominance—remains underdeveloped. Franklin’s restraint, while admirable, sometimes blunts the film’s impact, leaving it hovering between psychological thriller and creature feature without fully committing to either.

Viewed in retrospect, Link is a solid, thoughtful entry in the killer ape canon—more curious than terrifying, more cerebral than visceral. It lacks the cultural weight of Planet of the Apes or the grindhouse audacity of exploitation-era ape horror, but it compensates with atmosphere, performance, and an unsettling moral undercurrent.

For readers interested in the broader lineage of killer ape cinema—where Link fits alongside films that interrogate humanity’s uneasy relationship with intelligence, dominance, and the natural world—this film acts as a quiet but essential connective tissue, bridging prestige thrillers and pulp horror traditions.

The Prognosis:

A restrained, intelligent thriller that favours implication over excess, Link remains a peculiar but worthwhile footnote in the long, uneasy history of killer apes on screen.

  • Saul Muerte