Join The Hunt For Matthew Nichols

Two decades after her brother mysteriously disappeared on Vancouver Island, a documentary filmmaker sets out to solve his missing person's case. When a disturbing piece of evidence is revealed, she comes to believe he might still be alive.

As a fan of folk horror, I like the look of this, but the trailer gives me the impression that the filmmakers have either never seen or heard of The Blair Witch Project or have watched it way too much.

The film does come with a really neat interactive website that looks like a real timesink (again, rather Blair Witchy).

Hunting Matthew Nichols is on target to open in US cinemas on April 10.

HALLOWEEN HORROR: Antrum - The Deadliest Film Ever Made (2018)

As I've said many times I have a particular weakness for stories about cursed media, such as Cigarette Burns, Archive 81, Deadwax, The Hills Run Red, etc but the conceit of these movies tends to be that we, at most, see and hear only glimpses of the cursed object while our protagonists track it down and, invariably, suffer the fate of all those who have pursued it in the past.

The unique gimmick of 2018's Antrum: The Deadliest Film Ever Made is that we, the audience, are seeing the entire movie for ourselves, bookended by a pair of mockumentary segments, establishing the terrifying backstory and provenance of this "unique" print of a legendary 1970s Bulgarian (?) movie called Antrum that has left a trail of death in its wake.

In a sense, we are now the protagonists in the story of this artefact, "daring" to watch it despite its existential reputation.

The central movie-within-the-movie, while occasionally horrific and tense (because we keep expecting something to happen due to the manufactured reputation attached to what we are now watching), is essentially a grim, but possibly grittily mundane, nightmarish tale about a couple of children, Oralee (Nicole Tompkins) and Nathan (Rowan Smyth), on a camping trip.

The film opens with their beloved family dog, Maxine, being put down by a vet.

Nathan is traumatised by this, especially when his mother (Kristel Elling) suggests that Maxine has gone to Hell (for reasons we discover later in the film).

So Oralee hits upon the idea of taking her younger brother out into some spooky woods (clearly inspired by Japan's infamous Aokigahara forest) to dig a tunnel down to Hell to rescue the soul of Maxine.

Oralee has it all planned out as a therapeutic exercise, but her scheme goes awry as strange things start to happen and they stumble across a farm belonging to a pair of degenerate, white trash individuals (Dan Istrate and Circus-Szalewski) who like to capture people and cook them inside a giant brass effigy of Baphomet.

Although the role of the cannibals isn't particularly protracted, I still felt this was the weakest element of the film, a peculiar random encounter with shades of Texas Chain Saw Massacre meets the grisly realism of Man Bites Dog, jumbled in with the demonic terrors (imagined or otherwise) that the siblings were also contending with.

While this story on its own is a powerful thriller, with strong horror elements, the overriding unease of the film comes from what has supposedly been done to the print of Antrum that we are watching.

The documentary portions of the larger film acknowledge that there are subliminal images and symbols cut into the movie print, but there are plenty of other details (from Midsommar-style "faces" in the background of scenes to words scratched onto the negative) left for us to discover on our own, along with occasional odd jump cuts and auditory strangeness that really gets under your skin if you let it.

A puzzle box of a picture, where you find yourself searching for clues to the bigger picture while still being invested in the story of the two siblings in the woods, Antrum: The Deadliest Film Ever Made has definite shades of The Blair Witch Project and a soupçon of additional David Lynch weirdness about it.

Actually a Canadian horror film written and directed by David Amito and Michael Laicini, Antrum deserves praise for its hardcore attempt to establish a verisimilitude around the supernatural print of this supposedly cursed movie.

If you allow yourself to buy into this, even if just for the 95 minute running time of the movie, this has the potential to stay with you for the longest time... and don't be surprised if find yourself tempted to watch it again to see if you missed anything.

HALLOWEEN HORROR: Digging Up The Marrow (2014)

Known for horror movie series like Hatchet and Frozen, director Adam Green (playing himself) receives a wad of information in the mail from a fan who claims to have discovered real monsters.

Green decides this would be a brilliant subject for a documentary and heads out to meet the mysterious William Dekker (Twin Peaks' Ray Wise) and hopefully get a chance to see these so-called monsters.

Dekker spins him yarns about a subterranean world - accessed through holes in the ground usually found near cemeteries - called 'the Marrow', populated by an assemblage of deformed creatures.

Shot in a mock-documentary style (with swatches of 'shaky hand-held camera footage'), the film follows the childishly-excited Green and his sceptical cinematographer, and long-time collaborator, Will Barratt (also playing himself) as they interview Dekker and are then taken on a series of night-time reconnaissance missions, staking out an alleged Marrow entrance.  

Along the way, there are several cameos from known-genre figures (such as Kane Hodder, Mick Garris and Green's ex-wife Rileah Vanderbilt) who don't get what he is trying to achieve with this documentary and generally dismiss Dekker as a potentially-dangerous nutter or a con man.

This is more than a simple "what if monsters really existed?" movie, as a key element in the tale is that that question is being tackled by a horror movie director whose career is based on creating terrifying creatures.

The mockumentary is joyously incomplete, dangling plot threads that are never truly explained (such as the chronology of whatever is in Dekker's locked storeroom), but that's life. And the movie's brilliant ending justifies wholeheartedly why Green left his magnum opus unfinished.

I get why some people don't grok this. They're wrong. But I get it. Digging Up The Marrow is a slow burner, building up to its kick-in-the-teeth third act. Sure, there's a pretty terrifying jump scare about half-an-hour in, but the bulk of the film is about building atmosphere and creating a world.

I can only imagine that a lot of people - coming off the back of the Hatchet franchise - were caught off-guard by how subtle and intelligent Digging Up The Marrow is.

Thematically it owes a lot to the more-grounded tales of HP Lovecraft's oeuvre (particularly his "ghouls") and, of course, Clive Barker's Nightbreed, but the documentary style gives it a verisimilitude that is only undermined by the presence of such a recognisable actor as Ray Wise in a lead role.

Wise is superb, wholly convincing as the shady and driven Dekker, and I understand why Green cast him - to stress that this is 'make-believe' and not an attempt at a Blair Witch-style hoax. Yet I can't help but wonder how the film would have been received if Green had gone down that route with an unknown actor as Dekker.

In reality, Digging Up The Marrow came about because of a fortuitous confluence of events in Green's life. First, he received a highly detailed package of notes from a fan claiming to be the real story of Green's creation, Victor Crowley (from the Hatchet series).

Later the film director met artist Alex Pardee who gave him a booklet of illustrations for his exhibition Digging Up The Marrow that told the story of detective William Dekker commissioning him to draw creatures he'd encountered in his investigations of the Marrow.

HALLOWEEN HORROR: The Witch (2015)

Robert Eggers' The Witch: A New England Folktale is a masterpiece of engrossing storytelling, a rare intelligent horror film that relies on character and atmosphere rather than cheap jump scares and excessive gore.

In New England of 1630, farmer William (gravelly-voiced Ralph Ineson) is exiled from his village for his particular interpretation of the Christian religion, and takes his family to live in an isolated farmstead on the edge of a creepy forest.

He and his wife, Katherine (Game Of Thrones' Kate Dickie), ban their children from going into the forest, telling them they must stay within the boundary of the farm.

One day, their teenage daughter Thomasin (Anya Taylor-Joy) is playing peek-a-boo with the family's newest arrival, baby Samuel (Axtun Henry Dube/Athan Conrad Dube) when the newborn suddenly disappears... and the family's real troubles begin.

William claims the child was taken by a wolf, but increasingly the family come to believe it was the work of witchcraft.

The Witch can be seen as a metaphor for the current problems in America, something unknown strikes at the heart of the devout family, then retreats back into the woods and watches the flames of paranoia engulf the insular community, occasionally fanning the fire from its hiding place in the trees.

Much of the horror, in fact, comes from the religious intolerance  at the core of the family's fundamental beliefs; in a very real sense they make their own fear by cultivating brutal ideas about eternal damnation, sins of the flesh etc that confuse and terrify the younger members of the family.

The family does more to tear itself apart than the overt actions of whatever is in the woods.

It is easy to see from this how such shocking events as the Salem Witch Trials could come about, with random (but ultimately explicable) events and misspoke words (taken at face value) ultimately leading to burning people at the stake.

As William's family try to move on from the loss of Samuel, good intentions turn to disasters. Then we find ourselves questioning the initial motivations of these deeds and we have to wonder how much of their situation arises from William's own pride and hypocrisy?

By no stretch of the imagination is The Witch a mainstream schlock horrorfest. If you thought The Boy was a slow-burner, then this is positively glacial by comparison (even though the first 'incident' happens within the opening ten minutes), but it all helps build the tension and draw you in.

So dismal is the family's world that much of the time it looks almost like a black and white movie - which makes the odd moments of red all the more striking and important - and the script's period dialogue gets a bit mumbly at times (although not approaching the near-comical levels of Tom Hardy's character in The Revenant), but there is no missing the intent of what is being said, even if the odd sentence eludes you.

The acting from all concerned is incredible, accentuating the sense of verisimilitude that makes the events all the more believable.

To really get the most out of The Witch, you need to close the curtains, turn out the lights, turn off all your mobile devices, and allow yourself to sink into the stark 17th Century setting, focusing on the unfolding drama on the screen rather than whatever drama is unfolding in the Twitterverse.

Overall, the film is more a well-researched historical drama and psychological thriller than a blockbuster horror flick.

With period folklore shaping the 'supernatural' elements of the story, The Witch is worthy to stand alongside The Wicker Man, Blood On Satan's Claw and, even, The Blair Witch Project with its understated, but unnerving, approach to the genre that is absent many modern horror tropes.

Now I love a good monster movie as much as the next man, but I do wish there were more subtle and smart horror films like The Witch being made to balance out the genre's offerings.

HALLOWEEN HORROR: Lovely, Dark, and Deep (2023)

Socially-awkward Lennon (Krypton and Barbarian's Georgina Campbell) lands a position as a backcountry ranger in the (fictional) Arvores National Park.

The massive park is known for the large number of people who go missing there, including Lennon's sister when they were youngsters.

Lennon is determined to find out what is really going on in the dark and creepy liminal spaces of the heavily forested park, but encounters a conspiracy of silence among her work colleagues.

Head-strong and determined to march to the beat of her own drum, Lennon disobeys a direct order during a hunt for a missing person (who she actually ends up rescuing, thus attracting the ire of whatever is lurking in the darkness) and finds herself on five days notice.

It is during these final days of her first season in the park that things start to get really strange.

I had high hopes that Lovely, Dark, and Deep would be a solid blend of two of my favourite horror sub-genres: rural horror and cosmic horror, but ultimately it falls into a well-trodden formula seen in so many similar movies.

While it's thankfully not as grating as a pretentious Ben Wheatley rural horror outing, early Blair Witch and Picnic at Hanging Rock vibes soon give way to obtuse, clichéd and random imagery. 

There's an overly-long nightmare sequence that has Lynchian aspirations, and is clearly meant to be the closest we'll get to an explanation of events, but much of it ultimately comes off as being weird for weird's sake.

The film, written and directed by Teresa Sutherland (who wrote the far-superior The Wind) clearly has good intentions; there's an interesting idea buried in there but as a story it's poorly told.

The cycle of sacrifice to the hungry and unknowable spirits that inhabit the woods is a really novel concept, but is hidden among a lot of unnecessary distraction padding out the 87-minute run time. 

Clearly there isn't enough of the main plot, as written, to satisfactorily fill the movie's duration and so atmospheric artistry is called upon to inflate what is there.

On one hand there actually was much to admire in Lovely, Dark, and Deep but on the other was the inescapable fact that it was thin fare, reminiscent of so many other movies - both better and worse.

HALLOWEEN HORROR: Baskin (2015)

If you're looking for a memorable horror movie that feels like it was based on an HP Lovecraft story, but wasn't, then look no further than surreal Turkish splatterfest Baskin.

A generally unlikable, thuggish, group of police officers respond to a call for back-up in a rural area with a bad reputation.

Among the five-man team is Arda (Görkem Kasal), the newest recruit and the ward of the chief Remzi (Ergun Kuyucu).

As the freshest face in the unit, Arda has yet to be ground down, or corrupted, by the obviously hard work the men do.

Unfortunately on the way to the emergency, their van crashes.

The squad has to ask for directions from a strange group of "frog-hunters" they find camped at the edge of the lake their van ended up in.

A quick jaunt through the woods brings them to an abandoned Ottoman Empire-era police station.

The building appears to have been taken over by squatters, who have vandalised it with it peculiar graffiti and left evidence of all kinds of obscenities.

But it's only really as they descend into the lower levels of the building that the true horror of the building's current inhabitants becomes clear.

And the police officers soon find themselves in the clutches of a  terrifying, possibly sub-human, cult.

While Görkem Kasal's Arda is the nominal star of the story, the stand-out performance has to be the amazing Mehmet Cerrahoglu as the cult leader Baba (The Father).

Baba: The Father

A Turkish Clint Howard, Cerrahoglu's incredibly rare skin condition gives him a unique physical appearance that he draws amazing power from here in his first feature film role.

Forget all the splatterpunk Grand Guignol for a moment, Baba is the iconic image of Baskin that will endure.

Baskin (Turkish for 'Raid') was the first full-length movie from Can Evrenol, an extrapolation of his 11-minute short of the same name (which featured several of the same actors, including the magnificent Mehmet Cerrahoglu).

Buoyed along by a thumping, Carpenteresque, score, Baskin is Lovecraftian cosmic horror meets Hellraiser by way of The Void, Blair Witch, The Last Shift, In The Mouth Of Madness, and - for for better or for worse - Twin Peaks: The Return.

Even though it predates David Lynch's most recent visit to Twin Peaks, there's a key scene in Baskin - as well as its ending - that share important thematic, and stylistic, similarities and, I think, will ultimately decide whether you rate Evrenol's surreal shocker or not.

One thing I felt after viewing Baskin is that it is more of an experience than a coherent narrative. It's main purpose is to draw the audience into the mind-boggling ordeals that the policemen go through, rather than explaining too much or attaching it all to a traditional story structure.

Be warned, things do go a bit torture porn once the coppers are captured, but, for me, it's all about intent.

This isn't a bunch of wealthy businessmen torturing 'innocents' for shits and giggles, but an evil cult trying to transform its "chosen one" through arcane rituals handed down from their unknowable ancient deities.

Although the truly weird stuff doesn't start until the half-way mark of this 96-minute film, the pacing and rhythm are perfect so you're drawn in from the get-go, as the tension escalates and you try to figure out what the hell's going on.

Throughout Baskin there's talk about dreams (and dreams within dreams) and one - almost heavy-handed - shot of Arda nodding off in the van before everything goes sideways that I thought was the M. Night Shyamalan moment when the "it's-all-a-dream" twist was given away.

But, and I know some of you may consider this a spoiler, that's not what's going on. If it had all been a dream I would have been very annoyed and not nearly as smitten as I am by this flawed gem.

Much of Baskin has a dream-like nature, and dream-logic to its flow, but - as far as I'm concerned - what was happening to the protagonists was very real.

Having sat through much of the movie inner-monologuing "don't be a dream, don't be a dream", I'm now looking forward to going back and watching it again, comfortable in the knowledge that Baskin avoids that cop out (pun intended).

It is, however, genuinely the stuff of nightmares.

THROWBACK THURSDAY: The Horror! The Horror! The Horror!

These days I'm a sucker for horror movies, with a particular weakness for monster movies.

While my passion for the genre began with a teenage viewing of the original 1978 Dawn Of The Dead, one of my favourite franchises remains the Nightmare On Elm Street movies.

I can still clearly remember the buzz the first one generated around school when it came out in 1984.

I was 17 at the time and not as into horror movies as I am now, but the "word on the street" was - in those pre-internet, pre-DVD dark ages - that it was the "most terrifying movie anyone had ever seen ever!"

Of course, when I eventually got to see it on VHS it was quite tame; still brilliant, thrilling and gory, but nowhere near as horrific as my teenage mind had imagined, fuelled by the hyperbole of fellow teenagers who'd claimed to have seen it... and just made it through to the credits by the skin of their tough guy teeth.

Even at the time some of the mood-setting special effects seemed quite primitive, these days they look positively archaic.

I seem to recall that the first horror film my parents let me stay up to watch on television was The Omen II. That scared the crap out of me and gave me nightmares for days - but now that also seems quite tame to my cynical forty-something brain.

I guess at the time it was some 'reverse psychology' parenting to stop me pestering them to be allowed to stay up and watch 'grown-up' movies.

It must have worked because I don't recall any horror movie encounters until the height of the heady days of the tabloid-led 'video nasties' scare (in the early '80s), when it was de rigueur to go round each others' houses and dare each other to watch the latest piece of nasty that someone had acquired on video tape.

I didn't make it through either The Evil Dead or Texas Chain Saw Massacre - which is ironic as the latter would, decades later, form the backbone of my university dissertation, and both movies rate among my top horror flicks these days.

It wasn't until one of these illicit gatherings when a gang of us were watching George Romero's Dawn Of The Dead that I had my 'Road To Damascus' moment and realised I was actually rather enjoying this movie and would like to see more of the same.

But that's not to say I've become so hardened and blasé to horror that nothing has a lasting impact on me.

Here's a quick rundown of the top three horror movies that still give me the heebeejeebies:

• The Exorcist

• The Blair Witch Project

• The Amazing Mr Blunden

No real shocks with the first two. I know The Blair Witch Project doesn't do it for everyone, but it digs at me on a psychological level for some reason - I guess it's something about being lost in the woods with an unseen antagonist, and the cinema-vérité style, with the handheld camera, just makes it all the more real.

It's that level of 'truth' that also makes The Exorcist so unnerving to me. Later horror films have generally taken a lighter touch, and even been more action orientated, but The Exorcist unfolds like docudrama and, to this day, as with Blair Witch, I can't watch it without the lights on!

The final entry in this trio of terror is an unlikely one that is obviously very personal.

My gran took me to see The Amazing Mr Blunden at the town centre cinema in Tunbridge Wells when I was six - and it scarred me for life.

To be honest I can't remember much of the specifics of the film, just that it involved a ghost and a large house fire. It wasn't the ghost that got to me, it was the house fire.

To this day, I haven't watched the film again because something about it just flicked a switch in my little, six-year-old brain.

And I have no plans to... even though it appears to actually be a U-certificate kids' film and not the hideous torture porn my addled brain recalls being 'forced' to sit through Clockwork Orange style with my eyelids pinned back.

YellowBrickRoad (2010)

"One morning in New England, 1940, the entire population of Friar, New Hampshire - 572 people - walked together up a winding mountain trail and into the wilderness. They left behind their clothes, their money, all of their essentials. Even their dogs were abandoned, tied to posts and left to starve.

"No-one knows why. A search party dispatched by the U.S. Army eventually discovered the remains of nearly 300 of Friar's evacuees. Many had frozen to death. Others were cruelly and mysteriously slaughtered. The bodies of the remaining citizens are still unaccounted for.

"Over the years, a quiet cover-up operation managed to weave the story of Friar into the stuff of legends and backwoods fairy tales. The town has slowly repopulated, but the vast wilderness is mostly untracked, with the northern-most stretches off limits to local hunters and loggers.

"In 2008, the coordinates for the "YELLOWBRICKROAD" trail head were declassified. The first official expedition into a dark and twisted wilderness will attempt to solve the mystery of the lost citizens of Friar...and reach the end of the trail."

- plot summary from IMDB.

YellowBrickRoad, from the writing/directing team of Andy Mitton and Jess Holland, is frustratingly close to genius.

The powerful set-up (detailed above) had me hooked from the outset with its Lovecraftian overtones and engaging mystery, and this certainly isn't a movie that spoonfeeds answers to its audience.

I love a good mental challenge as much as the next person and films that don't necessarily spell out everything that's going on, but YellowBrickRoad suffers because - in a similar way to Lost - it is ultimately too obscure and obtuse.

While it is certainly a film that will stay with you as you try to ponder what fate befell the inhabitants of Friar - and the contemporary expedition  - I don't believe there are actually enough clues to adequately fill in the gaps.

As the the research team - which includes Smallville's Cassidy Freeman and her brother Clark Freeman (they also executive produced the movie) - get further up the trail, and into the mountains, they hear spectral 1940s music from ahead of them, which gets louder as they head north.

The sounds come and go as the journey progresses, but it appears to be having strange effects on some of the group, including memory loss, increased tension and confusion.

The unnerving suggestion that fixed points, directions and co-ordinates change depending on which way you are heading is the genuine stuff of nightmares.

The cinematography and audio effects are superb, although the editing and direction is occasionally jumpy (this, however, may be a deliberate ploy to heighten the hallucinogenic effects of the trail), that if nothing else makes this a gorgeous horror film to experience (I can only imagine how awesome some sequences - such as the auditory assault on the senses - would have been in a cinema).

We can easily pick up on the effects the music - and possibly even the environment - is having on the walkers, as well as clues such as the co-ordinates of the trailhead, the worn copy of the Wizard Of Oz in the town's picture house, the fact that people in the 1940s sought escape in the cinema etc., which kind of tie-in with the bizarre, rather leftfield ending, but there isn't enough indication of either the 'how' or 'why' to put together our own theories of what is going on.

I think I picked up on all the other Wizard Of Oz references - the scarecrow scene is particularly horrific and well done, but I wish there had been more moments like that (did I miss the Cowardly Lion and the Tin Man?).

Not that I necessarily wanted more gore. Great horror can unsettle you by mere suggestion alone (cf. The Haunting) and YellowBrickRoad does do a lot of creepy stuff with its sound effects and surreal disorientation but I think the film was simply too big, too ambitious, for its makers and got away from them in the end.

Stylistically, and thematically, YellowBrickRoad reminded me of two of my favourite horrors - The Blair Witch Project (although thankfully this isn't another 'found footage' movie) and In The Mouth Of Madness - and for the majority its 96 minute run I was convinced that YellowBrickRoad would be joining these two in the ranks of my personal greats.

Then it doesn't so much as fall apart at the end (as I can see where the story was trying to go, with the brief flash of the ghostly images etc) as simply come to a hurried conclusion.

During the build-up I found myself so engrossed in the on-screen developments that I didn't want the film to end and when it did, it did it in a most unsatisfactory, and slightly messed-up, way.

We were left with too many unanswered questions and not even a general suggestion as to where we might find answers.

Yet, for all its faults I can certainly see myself revisiting YellowBrickRoad, just to see if I missed any clues along the way, even though I'm totally convinced I'm never going to get all the answers I'm looking for.

Part of the frustration with this film is that, if you let it, it can really get under your skin. Like it or not, you are not going to forget your journey on the YellowBrickRoad in a hurry.

Cloverfield (2008)

My expectations were low going into Cloverfield. Could a monster movie shot entirely from the point-of-view of the people on the ground, on a handheld digital camera, really hold my interest for 85-minutes without giving me motion sickness from all the shaky camera work... and would it really be that good?

Well, for the first three-quarters of the film, it lived up to its hype.

The story kicks off at the leaving party for yuppie Rob (Michael Stahl-David) and unfolds, for about the first 10 or 15 minutes, like a soap opera episode as characters are sketched out and emotional sub-plots revealed amidst the banter and camaraderie.

Then suddenly the monster arrives in Manhattan and things start blowing up, people panic and mayhem ensues.

The combination of Drew Goddard's naturalistic script, Matt Reeves' fine direction and totally convincing performances from the cast of unknowns give Cloverfield an incredible verisimilitude that you really believe this is how ordinary people would behave if a monster attacked New York!

There are no scenes of military commanders spouting exposition or the President reacting to the emergency; we are given no explanations and only fleeting glimpses of the giant, mutant-Godzilla monster itself... we, the audience, only ever know as much as the man holding the camera.

The important thing to remember about Rob and his pals as protagonists is that are nothing special - the monster isn't targeting them specifically and they play no role in the possible downfall of of the creature either - they are just the everyman-on-the-street... who happens to have a camcorder.

Sure, it's a YouTube version of The Blair Witch Project on a big budget, but, here the action is more visceral and less psychological, here you know there's really a big damn monster because its knocked the head off the Statue of Liberty and is stomping its way round the city... dropping off little skittering critters along the way!

Then, with about 20 minutes left, and coming on the heels of incredible sequences in the darkened subway tunnels under the city and in an emergency military hospital, the film goes all Hollywood blockbuster.

The protagonists find themselves scrambling around inside collapsing tower blocks and surviving helicopter crashes; the believability factor is stretched a bit too much and our total immersion in the story wavers.

Also, seeing the monster in daylight, as we do towards the climax, however, briefly, still shows it to be a big CGI creature that wouldn't have looked out of place in Men In Black.

As an experiment in making a different sort of monster movie, Cloverfield is a roaring success, a mix of thrills and chills that just went too far at the end, possibly - and ironically - giving the audience too much of what they were used to and not sticking to its original conceit.

The Last Exorcism (2010)

The Last Exorcism comes tantalisingly close to being one of those rare, perfect horror movies, an intelligent blend of The Exorcist and The Blair Witch Project (two of the most unnerving, pure horror movies ever made, in my opinion), until it derails into silliness for the final sequence.

I can understand and see what the filmmakers were trying to do in these closing scenes because, in all honesty, up until that point, no matter how good the film was, it wasn't really saying anything new, but it was such a sudden lurch in focus that it didn't quite work.

The film - shot on hand-held camera as a documentary - follows the charismatic and charming Reverend Cotton Marcus (Patrick Fabian), a former child minister grown into a performing preacher, disillusioned with the idea of exorcisms, who agrees to bring a film crew along on his last exorcism to expose the practice as fakery.

Rev. Marcus and the camera crew travel to an isolated farm in rural Louisiana, where widower Louis Sweetzer (Louis Herthum) believes his teenage daughter, Nell (Ashley Bell), is possessed by a demon and is slaughtering his cattle at night.

For the first half-hour of this comparatively short (83 minute) movie nothing out of the ordinary happens as we get to know Cotton, his family, his motivations and his beliefs and the groundwork is laid for future events. But after his 'phony' exorcism things start to get creepy and then escalate in wonderfully unpredictable ways as it becomes clear there is a real demon at work (one disappointment is that the scene on the cover of the DVD doesn't appear anywhere in the movie!)

In this era of Grand Guignol torture-porn it makes a refreshing change to see a horror film that uses intelligence, magician's misdirection and subtly to unnerve it audience. I was completely taken in by the fact that I couldn't guess what was going to happen next during the core of the movie and believed in the actors one hundred per cent.

All the performances are spot-on, but particularly powerful are Patrick Fabian as the 'con man' forced to re-examine his cynicism and Ashley Bell as the unnerving innocent victim, twisting her demon-wracked body in all sorts of contortions  (without the aid of special effects, I am led to believe).

Compared to, say, Cloverfield the shaking, hand-held camera isn't too intrusive and there are moments (mainly when Nell steals the camera in the night) that the film couldn't have worked any other way.

This isn't a film that relies on sudden shocks to get it scares - although there are a couple - rather it relies on suggestion and psychological manipulation, dropping hints along the way as to what's really going on, although the chances are you won't piece everything together until the credits are rolling.

For the most part, The Last Exorcism relies on subtle, edge-of-the-seat tension (in the style of The Exorcist and The Blair Witch Project, as I've already said, which is why it was a shame that the ending veered off into pseudo-Lovecraftian territory with a set-up that sadly reminded me of both Hot Fuzz and K-9 And Company: A Girl's Best Friend, neither of which exactly rank as the pinnacle of horror cinema.

Stylistically, the shaky-cam/faux documentary approach certainly carries the movie, adding an air of Truth that helped sell the discrete horror, but it also rather undermined the ending - not that we needed to see everything that was going on, but frankly it made the audience all the more aware of how ridiculous the scenario was and somehow managed to undo the carefully stitched verisimilitude that director Daniel Stamm had created.

It's as though the ending actually showed too much and was almost unnecessary, which is a massive shame because, although produced by Eli Roth (and it was his name used to, rather misleadingly, sell the film), The Last Exorcism is the total antithesis of the gore-splattered horror - in the vein of Saw and Hostel - one usually associates with Roth's work.

[REC] (2007)

It must be a nightmare trying to conjure up an entirely new idea for a horror film these days, but the Spanish writer/directors of [REC], Jaume Balaguero and Paco Plaza, took a good stab at it.

A TV reporter (the amazingly cute Manuela Velasco) and her camerman are filming a "day in the life" documentary about a local fire crew, when the call comes in to rescue a woman trapped in her apartment.

Unfortunately this routine job turns out to be anything but when the old woman suddenly attacks and bites one of her saviours.

Things spiral out of control from there, when the people in the apartment block find they have been sealed in by the police and special forces - because of a "possible infectious outbreak".

As with Cloverfield, The Blair Witch Project, Man Bites Dog, Diary Of The Dead and probably several others I've missed, the film is entirely seen from the point-of-view of the unseen TV cameraman, making the audience very much a part of the action, limiting our knowledge of what's going on to what the reporter sees and hears.

It's superbly paced from the get-go, with events almost happening in 'real time', with thrills and spills snowballing as the 'outbreak' in the apartment block gets increasingly out of control.

Manuela Velasco

As TV journalist Ángela, Manuela Velasco is amazingly easy on the eye, and a convincing actress to boot, while the rest of the cast were clearly chosen for their 'non-film star' looks, which adds to the authenticity of the piece.

[REC] drip feeds the clues as to what's really going on, but it doesn't long for a savvy audience to grasp the fact that we're seeing a zombie outbreak up close and personal, which is why it's mystifying - and intriguing - when the plot takes a sudden and unexpected left turn into Exorcist territory towards the end.

I love films that let me figure out what's going on for myself, but this sudden shift from scientific reasoning to supernatural weirdness caught me totally off balance.

There had been mutterings from an elderly couple earlier, that hinted at there being more to this than meets the eye, but this was a major leap of faith by the film-makers that I wish had been developed slightly earlier.

Nevertheless, [REC] is a brilliant zombie flick, and a major change of pace from the usual Romero fare (not that there's anything wrong with that), so is well worth checking out if you're into zombie action horror... or just want to watch a really cute Spanish woman running around in a vest top for the better part of 75 minutes.

[REC] was remade in the States, for audiences who can't handle sub-titles, as Quarantine.

The Outwaters (2022)

For reasons that now elude me, The Outwaters has been on my “must see” list for several years.

Now thanks to Shudder I’ve seen it and that’s two hours of my life where I could have been doing something much better.

Four twentysomethings go into the Mojave Desert to shoot a music video in an out-of-the-way place, and instead get tangled up in some very weird and horrific, indescribable, cosmic horror shit. The film we're watching is then presented as recovered footage entered into evidence for a police report on the four missing persons.

I cannot tell a lie: The Outwaters is the epitome of everything I hate about "found footage" films.

On one hand, this aspect has a very solid air of authenticity to it, but that means: migraine city.

Written and directed by the film's main protagonist Robbie Banfitch, this is "found footage" at its most irritating.

For the better part of 110 minutes, we are “treated” to too much camera shake, too many “in your face” close-ups, muffled dialogue and blurred and out-of-focus visuals.

It’s really difficult to follow along or get a handle on any of our protagonists. There’s no one to empathise with or even care about.

This is certainly no Blair Witch or As Above, So Below, where effort was made to present faux footage in a cinematic manner. Even the divisive Skinamarink makes more sense.

The extended 20-minute set-up is really hard going, and a waste of film, as the narrative only starts to struggle into being once the characters get to the desert and hints of the peculiarities-to-come start to manifest. 

The film definitely feels like it's going to pick up once the quartet are in desert and getting spooked by strange subterranean explosions and the mandatory paranormal light shows, but too much is buried under a surfeit of found footage tropes. 

An hour into the viewer's ordeal, the really weird shit seems to kick off, but it's the middle of the night, and it’s impossible to get even a vague idea of what’s going on as all we see are random flashes of light accompanied by hysterical screaming.

Banfinch strives way too hard to find verisimilitude in the footage but instead simply looses his audience quiet rapidly in a mess of blood and strange sounds, screaming red reptiles, all mixed in with some time loop shenanigans, and some kind of demon.

There's even a half-baked attempt to suggest the characters had stumbled into some top secret government experimental zone (à la Stranger Things), but that's just another piece of mud slung at the wall to see what sticks. That and the self-inflicted penile amputation that's way funnier than I think it was supposed to be.

This is the sort of movie that a certain breed of film student will spend ages trying to analyse and dissect, coming up with their own elaborate theorems of what it all means. But, seriously, you could watch a black screen with someone screaming in your face for an hour and come to the same conclusions. 

To be fair, I think I actually get what Banfinch was trying to do by bombarding us with a constant, supercharged sense of extreme disorientation, but he just didn’t do it very well; his David Lynch aspirations got away from him.

Honestly, The Outwaters annoyed me immensely (it's a long time since a film has wound me up quite so much, for all the wrong reasons) and if nothing else is a sterling example of why, as a general rule (with a few exceptions), I find that "found footage" films suck.

Even ones that try to mask their lo-fi offerings as "cosmic horror".

Apollo 18 (2011)

As we all know 1972's Apollo 17 was NASA's last manned mission to the Moon (to date).

Or so we were led to believe.

My latest bargain Blu-Ray purchase, Apollo 18, posits a top secret mission in December 1973 to plant Cold War listening devices on The Moon, but something went wrong and that's why the Americans have never been back.

Then apparently in 2011, a whistleblower dumped 80 hours of video footage from the mission online, from which this 'found footage' style, faux documentary, was assembled.

Now, I thought I was over the 'found footage' craze shortly after the market was saturated with ill-conceived Blair Witch Project knock-offs, but recently I've stumbled upon a couple (this and the superb As Above, So Below) that have made me reconsider my prejudices.

One thing Apollo 18 gets right straight off the bat is that it doesn't hang around. Within minutes of introducing the three astronauts we're going to be following they're in space and then on The Moon.

And the speeding train doesn't slow down. It's not long after they've landed that the weird shit starts happening and, given the speed with which events unfold, you find yourself wondering how director Gonzalo López-Gallego is going to keep Brian Miller's script running for the film's 75-minute duration (it's listed as 86-minutes, but the balance is just the closing credits).

But fear not. The pacing is superb throughout, and, barring a couple of lukewarm jump scares (one's played for laughs anyway), the story is somewhere between a modern Doctor Who and Event Horizon in its atmosphere.

In fact, I would make an argument for Apollo 18's possible inclusion in an unofficial headcanon of the Alien film franchise timeline.

After all, it manages to keep the incident (except for the 2011 'leak') under wraps, with only the Department of Defence being in the know, and takes a very measured approach to the possibility of an extraterrestrial lifeform.

Already plagued by communications interference, the astronauts of Apollo 18 discover evidence of a heretofore unknown Soviet mission to The Moon, but then begin to suspect that there's also something 'inhuman' up there with them as well.

The film's footage looks, for the most part, as though it's aged, period stock, encapsulating López-Gallego's eye for authenticity that - to an untrained, unscientific eye like my own - feels as though the 'found footage' could have been genuine.

Except for the unfortunate fact that - and this is no reflection at all on the actors, who are all wholly convincing - I recognised the men playing the three lead characters: Capt. Ben Anderson (Warren Christie, from Alphas, Batwoman etc), Lt Col John Grey (Ryan Robbins, from Riverdale, Arrow etc) and Commander Nathan Walker (Lloyd Owen, from The Adventures of Young Indiana Jones).

But, let's be honest, the story is ultimately so far into tinfoil hat conspiracy theory land that no one is really going to believe it's real.

That said, it appears to have been convincing enough that NASA felt the need to put out a disclaimer.

Apollo 18 does a smashing job of maintaining its verisimilitude, right up to the denouement where we get the "official" explanation of what happened to the three men.

Within the context of the story, I bought the reason for NASA never returning to The Moon one hundred percent.

If you can accept the movie's premise, of being 'lost footage' from a classified American space mission, then you should love this.

Hellboy - The Crooked Man (2024)

It's the late 1950s and, following a train accident, Hellboy (Jack Kesy) and rookie Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense researcher Bobbie Jo Song (Adeline Rudolph aka Agatha from The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina) find themselves stranded in the Appalachian Mountains.

They soon become entangled in the life of Tom Ferrell (Jefferson White), an ex-soldier and former resident of the area who has returned to try and undo a pact he made with a demon when he was a child.

Initially, they accompany Tom to visit his former childhood sweetheart, Cora Fisher (Hannah Margetson), who has since become a witch.

Tom explains to the BRPD agents that he had been seduced by a witch called Effie Colb (Leah McNamara) who had taight how to create a lucky totem and urged him to summon a local demonic ghost-entity called The Crooked Man (Martin Bassindale).

Cora returns to her home, telling Tom and the agents that she is being persued by other witches... and it tunrs out that they are being led by Effie, who looks exactly as she did when Tom met her all those years earlier.

She is riding a white horse that turns out to be Tom's transformed father (Anton Trendafilov), who promptly dies when Effie is scared away by Hellboy.

Tom wants to take his father to the nearby church, to be buried in consecreated ground.

However, on the way they are attacked by a demonic snake that kills Cora and injects Hellboy with its toxin, causing him to have hallucinatory visions of his mother, Sara (Carola Colombo), herself a witch.

At the church, the group - meeting the blind Reverend Watts (Joseph Marcell aka the legendary Geoffrey from The Fresh Prince of Bel Air) are besieged by The Crooked Man and his coterie of witches.

Through some clever magic, our heroes manage to repel the supernatural attackers.

Hellboy and Tom then chase after The Crooked Man to the abandoned mansion that was once his home, while Jo and The Reverend head into the old mines that crisscross the mountain, believing that that is the source of The Crooked Man's power.

Working from a screenplay co-written by Mike Mignola (the creator of Hellboy) and Christopher Golden, his frequent collaborator, director and co-writer Brian Taylor serves up a Hellboy movie unlike any that have come before.

I have to confess that, for all my decades as a comic book reader, I might have only read a handful of single Hellboy issues and they've never really hooked me as Guillermo del Toro's early 2000's pulpy Hellboy duology did.

But, Hellboy: The Crooked Man, an adaptation of a 2008 Hellboy mini-series of the same name by Mike Mignola, steps away from the superheroic blockbuster nature of the del Toro era and leans, instead, heavily into Hellboy's horror roots. 

It's of a smaller scale, and more focused on its single driving narrative, than we might be used to - cinematically-speaking - from movies involving Hellboy and his compadres in the BPRD.

But have no doubt, Hellboy: The Crooked Man is a phenomenal down-and-dirty work of  mesmerising, disorientating weird Appalachian folk magic that has more in common with the works of HP Lovecraft (who gets namechecked) and atmospheric films like The Blair Witch Project, Night of The Demon, The VVitch, and Evil Dead.

If you know my taste in horror then you can see why I loved The Crooked Man.

The verisimilitude of the world created is second to none, relying mainly on practical effects, and proving you don't need a honking big Hollywood budget to produce memorable horror movies.

While this is very much its own thing - officially unconnected to del Toro's wonderful flicks and whatever the dickens that 2019 mess was - I could see an argument for Jack Kesy's charismatic Hellboy being a younger version of Ron Perlman's take on the character.

I can also see why The Crooked Man might not be for everyone, but given that this was co-written by the character's creator, I have to believe that this is the closest iteration of Hellboy to the source material.