Category: Genre: Horror

  • Nope. Dir. Jordan Peele. Universal Pictures. 2022

    Nope. Dir. Jordan Peele. Universal Pictures. 2022

    Jordan Peele’s latest film nope follows siblings OJ and Emerald Haywood in the aftermath of their father’s unexpected death. The siblings ‘We ain’t got no more problems’ is the foreboding line said by Otis Haywood moments before his untimely death and the supernatural haunting begins on the Haywood family ranch. Jordan Peele’s latest film Nope…

  • Sonnie’s Edge. Dir. Dave Wilson. Netflix. 2019

    Sonnie’s Edge. Dir. Dave Wilson. Netflix. 2019

    That fear of death. Do you feel it? Are you scared now? – Sonnie Content warning: sexual assault, female violence, abuse Netflix’s animated anthology, Love Death & Robots, first aired in 2019, enticing viewers through a display of episodically unique art styles and stories. Created by David Fincher and Tim Miller, the series provided a creative leeway…

  • An American Werewolf in London. Dir. John Landis. Universal Pictures. 1981.

    An American Werewolf in London. Dir. John Landis. Universal Pictures. 1981.

    “The wolf’s bloodline must be severed; the last remaining werewolf must be destroyed. It’s you David.” An American tourist, traumatised and alone wakes up in a London hospital after an attack on the Yorkshire Moors. His newly cursed body drifts between human and wolf as his deceased friend haunts him in limbo, telling him he…

  • Train to Busan. Dir. Yeon Sang-ho. Next Entertainment World. 2016.

    Train to Busan. Dir. Yeon Sang-ho. Next Entertainment World. 2016.

    Content warning: This article contains images of real animal death. The opening of Yeon Sang-ho’s action-horror film Train to Busan (2016) interprets the circumstances that lead to the epidemic at the centre of the ‘zombie apocalypse’ genre through an incident with a farmer and a deer. Considering the film’s narrative is characterised by a linearity…

  • Bird Box. Dir. Susanne Bier. Netflix. 2018.

    Bird Box. Dir. Susanne Bier. Netflix. 2018.

    Susanne Bier’s Bird Box follows Malorie Hayes as she navigates the events and aftermath of an outbreak of creatures, which seem to take on the form of a person’s worst fear, deepest sadness or greatest loss, and thereby drive humans to suicide when the people look at them. However, the monsters themselves are never seen…

  • Lamb. Dir. Valdimar Jóhannsson. Sena. 2021

    Lamb. Dir. Valdimar Jóhannsson. Sena. 2021

    Like a lamb to the slaughter, the slow-burn, absurd surrealness of A24’s Lamb (2021) leads the audience to an end that blends both chilling twists and heartbreaking loss as the complications that are inevitable with blurring binaries between human-animal relations come to fruition. In a playful, sardonic reconfiguration of oppositions between captivity and freedom, wildness…

  • The Silence of the Lambs. Dir. Jonathan Demme. Orion Pictures. 1991.

    Alongside terrific and terrifying characters such as Hannibal Lecter and Clarice Starling, there is another sinister dramatis persona evoked in Jonathan Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs – that of the ‘Death’s Head Hawk-Moth’ and Buffalo Bill’s relation to them. It is unsurprising that the moth in this scene invokes dread in Clarice and the audience,…

  • Okja. Dir. Bong Joon-ho. Netflix. 2017

    Okja. Dir. Bong Joon-ho. Netflix. 2017

    There are two kinds of pigs that make an appearance in Okja; genetically modified super-pigs and greedy, corporate capitalist pigs. The slaughterhouse scene forces the viewer to dispel any false idealism surrounding the reality of the meat industry, an explicit criticism of how human exceptionalist thinking blended with modern ‘capitalist delirium’ [1] has ruined the…

  • Arachnophobia, Dir. Frank Marshall, Hollywood Pictures, Franklin Entertainment, 1990.

    In one of the most suspenseful scenes in Arachnophobia, a young woman goes for a shower in the bathroom but is ambushed by one of the spider offspring in a tense cat-and-mouse sequence. Intended as an obvious play on the shower trope in horror films – where a conventionally attractive woman is stalked and attacked…

  • Come and See. Dir. Elem Klimov. Belarusfilm.1985.

    Life Elem Klimov’s 1985 pernicious masterpiece Come and See leaves viewers in a state of abject horror. The film depicts the atrocities commited by the Nazi regime in Byelorussia during the Second World War, following Florya on his path from innocence to experience. The cow is introduced to us halfway through the narrative working as…