Horror has always done its best work at the edges, where unease creeps in before anything jumps out. From the expressionist dread of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari to Kubrick stretching psychology to breaking point in The Shining, the genre earns serious respect when it treats fear as a way of examining how we actually live. Browse Macca's reviews below.
Rating: 1.0★
Few films from the late 1970s American exploitation circuit carry quite the same poisonous reputation as I Spit on Your Grave. Released in 1978 under the original title Day of the Woman, a name its director would later insist better reflected his intentions, the film arrived at a moment when
Rating: 2.0★
Short films occupy a peculiar corner of the film world. With no commercial distributor to answer to and often no budget worth speaking of, a short is theoretically the purest expression of a filmmaker's instincts: you have a handful of minutes, a single idea, and nowhere to hide.
Rating: 3.5★
Brian De Palma's career is one of the more fascinating long games in American cinema. He spent the late 1960s making low-budget, countercultural oddities before pivoting, almost instinctively, towards the kind of suspense-driven genre work that would come to define him. Sisters, released in 1972, sits
Rating: 2.5★
Casshern arrives with a genuinely unusual pedigree. The source material is a 1973 Tatsunoko Production anime series, Casshan: Robot Hunter, which built a modest but loyal following in Japan on the strength of its pulpy, post-apocalyptic premise and its brooding cyborg hero. The property sat largely dormant for three
Rating: 2.0★
The legend of La Llorona, the wailing woman who drowned her own children and now wanders waterways weeping for them, is one of the most enduring pieces of folklore across Latin America. Versions of it predate the Spanish conquest, and the figure has since been absorbed into everything from nursery
Rating: 2.5★
The Aztec death whistle is one of those historical curiosities that sounds almost too good to be true. Unearthed by archaeologists in Mexico during the 1990s, these small clay instruments shaped like skulls produce a sound variously described as a human scream, a howling wind, or something altogether harder to
Rating: 3.0★
Horror remakes are a risky business at the best of times, and the early 2000s were full of Hollywood studios eyeing up Japanese genre cinema with the kind of enthusiasm that did not always translate well to screen. Ringu, Hideo Nakata's 1998 adaptation of Koji Suzuki's
Rating: 3.0★
Few films can claim to have genuinely rewired an entire genre, but Hideo Nakata's Ring from 1998 comes about as close as anything released in the last three decades. Based on Koji Suzuki's 1991 novel of the same name, the film follows a journalist who begins
Rating: 2.0★
David Cronenberg is, by now, a name that carries genuine weight in the history of cinema. From the surgical dread of The Brood to the slow-burn menace of A History of Violence, his filmography spans decades and shifts in style while remaining unmistakably his own. But every career has
Rating: 3.0★
There are films that arrive with a straightforward pitch and deliver more or less what they promise, and then there are films like Mad God. Phil Tippett's feature debut as director is something else entirely: a stop-motion nightmare three decades in the making, resurrected from a shelved
Rating: 3.0★
There are films that arrive quietly and find their audience over time, and then there are films that kick the door in. Clive Barker's Hellraiser, released in 1987, belongs firmly in the second category. Adapted by Barker himself from his own 1986 novella The Hellbound Heart, the film
Rating: 1.0★
There is a particular corner of low-budget genre filmmaking where Thailand and the United States occasionally meet, producing co-productions that are a little difficult to categorise and often equally difficult to track down. Dead Earth, released in 2020 under the banner of Kaos Entertainment, sits firmly in that
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