Picturenose

Grim scary tale
In this age of carbon-copy horror, of excreble sequels and ‘three-quels’, such as with the Saw franchise, it is refreshing to see that there are still directors out there who are capable of putting the audience through it - the most recent genre example, before Greg McLean’s Wolf Creek (2005), was Fabrice Du Welz’s Calvaire (2004) but, such is the intensity of McLean’s vision, Calvaire seems like a picnic in the woods by comparison…

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Going, going, Gong Tau!

James and I were lucky enough to be able to attend the Brussels International Fantasy Film Festival (BIFFF) earlier this year. We also gave away lots of tickets for their premieres and first European showings, so if you want in next year, keep it here.

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Not much to see here

And so, the legacy of Ringu (1998) lives on…will horror directors never tire, do you think, of creepy little dead girls with long dark hair? Not if John Fawcett’s The Dark (2005) is anything to go by. Sure, it has a good cast and, judging by Fawcett’s previous horror effort, Ginger Snaps (2000) a promising director, but there is little here that rises above straight-to-DVD shocks.

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Poor revision
It’s always the way with horror, isn’t it? How quickly do you reveal your monster? How do you keep the scares coming once the audience knows what it’s dealing with?

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Return to sender…
Sarah Michelle Gellar (Buffy, for the uninitiated) is Joanna Mills, a successful trucking company rep who takes a business drive from her home in St. Louis to the rural area of Texas where she grew up. A perilously-close-to-scary prologue has already set the scene - something creepy happened to her at a carnival when she was a young girl and, not long after she arrives, shock-horror flashbacks begin to plague her.

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Time, the old enemy…

‘All irregularities will be handled by the forces controlling each dimension. Transuranic, heavy elements may not be used where there is life. Medium atomic weights are available: Gold, Lead, Copper…Jet, Diamond, Radium, Sapphire, Silver and Steel. Sapphire and Steel, have been assigned.’

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End of the ‘X’ factor?
So, with the passing of all the fin de siècle angst that in no small degree provided the inspiration for Chris Carter’s (at times) seminal sci-fi/horror show The X-Files, are we left with very much to maintain the mood ten years on from the first film The X-Files: Fight the Future (1998) and six years after the end of the TV series?

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Bone shaker
A bona fide horror flick, The Skeleton Key is the suspenseful tale of young Caroline Ellis (Kate Hudson), a hospice carer who, disillusioned with the easy-come-easy-go attitude at the New Orleans hospital where she’s been working, lands a job at a fading mansion an hour up the road. There, she meets the cranky Violet Devereaux (Gena Rowlands) and her paralysed, dying husband Ben (John Hurt). Despite Violet’s reservations about our gal, the couple’s lawyer, Luke (Peter Sarsgaard) is on hand to help convince the matriarch that her prospective employee is more than just a city slicker. However, in the best tradition of Southern gothic, the house holds secrets - and some doors were meant never to be opened, even if you do have a skeleton key…

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Monster mess

‘I’m evil,’ said Lecter. ‘You can’t reduce me to mere behavioural abnormality.’

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Just not happening…
It’s strange - the exalted expectation ahead of every new Alfred Hitchcock M. Night Shyamalan effort seems usually based on amnesia concerning his recent work (which, quite frankly, is amazing, when you consider just how woeful both Lady in the Water (2006) and The Village (2004) were) and a kind of long-term collective eulogizing over how good his first film, The Sixth Sense (1999), supposedly was.

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