Sundance: 'Hatching' or Mommy Issues – The Movie

by Cláudio Alves

Motherhood is a subject ripe for horrific extrapolation. Some might regard their offspring as hopeful mirrors, wishing them to be an improved reflection. Disappointment, when it unavoidably comes, is a spiky cruel monster. There are others for whom birthing a mirror is the worst possible fate, the child a magnifying glass of perceived faults. Moreover, the similarity can feel draining, a youthful leech sucking out its mother's lifeforce, a constant reminder of mortality. Hanna Bergholm's Hatching takes these perceptions of motherhood and mixes them with body horror, cranks them up to eleven, and ties everything up in a pink satin bow that reeks of vomit and discarded flesh…

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Sundance: 'Master' is a fine horror debut

by Matt St Clair

Mariama Diallo’s feature debut Master is a horror film about the anxieties of being a Black woman in a predominantly white space. Diallo stresses such perturbations by blending paranormal elements with real-world institutional prejudice and the all-too-petrifying feeling of being an outsider. Although certain story elements outweigh others, Master thrives on its slow-burn execution and sheer demonstration of danger lingering around every corner...

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Sundance: 'You Won't Be Alone' stirs and shape-shifts

by Matt St Clair

You Won’t Be Alone, the new Macedonian folk horror tale premiering at Sundance, is not for the faint of heart. Yet, for a film with such grotesque violence, Goran Stolevski's feature debut is strangely moving and intimate. His film is a poetic and philosophical depiction of what it means to be human; It arouses and stirs as often as it repels...

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Sundance: The pitch black repercussions when you 'Speak No Evil'

by Jason Adams

I don't know why people never heed the wise words of the credits to The Real World opening credits when they find themselves inside a horror movie of manners, but if we all could just stop being so damned polite and start getting real there'd be way fewer corpses dumped into the ditches of the world, and doesn't that sound a lot nicer for everybody? But no, nobody listens to the reality-programming Cassandras called Bunim and Murray, and so we end up watching people like the Danish family at the heart of Christian Tafdrup's pitch-black Sundance horror Speak No Evil, who don't speak up for themselves and pay the darkest of prices for it. Get real, world! It's for your own good...

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Review: Scream '22

By Glenn Dunks

Movies made predominantly out of a requirement for fan service can go one of a few ways. They can give audiences just what they wanted (as we’ve seen with some MCU movies), they can give audiences what they didn’t know they needed (as we’ve seen with some MCU movies), or they can be a complete and utter dog’s breakfast (as we’ve seen with some MCU movies).

The Scream franchise isn’t as long-running or as mythologized as iconic horror brands like Halloween, Texas Chainsaw Massacre or A Nightmare on Elm Street. But what it does have that those series do not is a consistent core—both in characters (Sidney, Gale and Dewey) and tone (comically meta slasher)—that has remained unwavering across 25 years and five individual movies. Fan service here then is actually quite tricky...

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