I agree about the moving hedge animals sequences. In the book they actually distracted from the horror of the Overlook. Though the book is a fantastic piece of work (possibly Kings best after ‘Pet Semetary’) and Jacks spiral into despair and madness is more believeable and treated with considerable more sympathy, the film is certainly more…[Read more]

I love all of the above but I particularly like the chilling dialogue between Jack and Grady in the bathroom after the advocat incident ending with : “Perhaps they need a good ‘talking to’ if you don’t mind my saying so…perhaps…a bit more.”
Gradys whole ‘corrected’ monologue, delivered so coldly and with such aloof conviction is very very chilling…

Remakes….don’t see the point personally, however as they’re making a new ‘vision’ of it, I wish that they’d tried something akin to the 4th film and given it an epic feeling exploring the origin of the box and its consequences on the many people that have sought it. I fear that they will merely try to relaunch ‘Pinhead’ as a horror icon (but…[Read more]

‘The Hellbound Heart’ now seems something extra extraordinary and special because of where the franchise took the Pinhead character. In the book Pinhead (or Lead Cenobite) was ambiguous…an androgynous, perhaps even female, certainly not the major character but a servant of hell. The films downplayed the dark sexuality of the cenobites to an…[Read more]

Ok…let’s kick start the proceedings with ‘The Medusa Touch’ starring Richard Burton and Lee Remick (aswell as a plethora of British stars). It chronicles a man who has “a gift for disaster”…that is the power to creaate catastrophic events using the power of his mind.
The premise is simple enough but it’s performed with such conviction and has…[Read more]

It’s best moments were the sequences that bordered on abstraction – the dialogue-less surreal moments. These parts were very evocative of the game. The speech heavy narrative stuff didn’t come over well, (and some of the acting was very wooden) but then the dialogue heavy bits and voice acting in the games isn’t usually very effective. Silent Hill…[Read more]

With regards to the above…how do you feel bout the ‘relaunch’ of Hammer as a studio (or at least distribution company) and the films that it has slated to make so far?

I ask this as, as far as I can see, there isn’t a gothic in sight?

There’s a lot of cross-over with the casting…this tended to happen in all of British drama, all sorts of people would turn up! I believe that the Producer of the show in the 70′s was fascinated by the darker side of genre fiction and actively tried to make the show a little more complex and adult, hence the Hammer feeling about a number of the…[Read more]

The snobbery is bizarre isn’t it? Britain has such a heritage in horror and fantastic fiction… ‘Beowulf,’ Byron, Mary Shelley’s ‘Frankenstein’, Stoker, Stevenson, Wilde’s ‘Portrait of Dorian Gray’…the list just goes on and on…but for some reason this is very rarely celebrated.

Our big budget films only tend to source the ‘safe’…[Read more]

Absolutely right about Quatermass..and Neale was an writer. ‘The Stone Tape’ is another classic for this reason – proposing that there is a link between supernatural phenomena and science but not making it any less scary. We can only dream what H3 would have been like…though it’s still highly under-rated.

The amazing thing about ‘Curse of…[Read more]

Thank you first of all for noticing this group and replying with such sincerity.

Interesting that ‘Quatermass and the Pit’ has been cited so early. I was discussing this film with my Dad the night before last and enthusing about all the fantastic ideas in it – drawing together Sci-Fi, horror and a mention to folklore (via ‘Hobbs end’).…[Read more]

Hello all,
I’m a horror animator and I’ve just completed my most recent short film ‘The Hairy Hands’ – based on a Dartmoor ghost story. I was lucky enough to get Doug Bradley and Nicholas Vince to do a little voiceover work on the film and I’m hoping to get it shown at a number of festivals this year. How are all you other indie filmmakers finding…[Read more]