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: 3.0★
Let's get the heresy out of the way immediately: I have never quite understood the rabid, unquestioning devotion to Sam Raimi's Evil Dead franchise. While the world collectively worships at the altar of cabin-in-the-woods terror, I've found myself consistently underwhelmed by
Rating: 3.0★
Being buried alive, getting lost underground, being swallowed by the dark with no way out: there are few fears more primal, more hardwired into us, than the ones that live beneath the surface. Neil Marshall gets that. The Descent understands, on a gut level, exactly what makes the idea of
Rating: 4.0★
There is a very specific, primal dread associated with picking up a stranger on a desolate stretch of highway, and Robert Harmon's 1986 thriller The Hitcher weaponises that exact anxiety to brilliant effect. It gets under your skin almost immediately, tapping into something ancient and instinctive, the kind
Rating: 3.5★
There is a deeply unsettling genius to the way David Robert Mitchell frames a suburban street. The camera slowly, deliberately pans across wide-angle shots of empty neighbourhoods, and suddenly you find your eyes darting frantically around the screen, hunting for that next dull-eyed figure casually walking towards the
Rating: 2.0★
I'm not inherently opposed to a zombie comedy. When done right, blending the undead with sharp, dark humour can yield absolute classics. From Shaun of the Dead to the chaotic fun of the Return of the Living Dead series, the genre has proven it can handle laughs and
Rating: 3.0★
Rachel Sennott made me queue this up. Simple as that. After being completely won over by her in Shiva Baby and Bottoms, I knew she was one of the most exciting young comic performers working right now, and I wasn't about to let a slasher-comedy with her
Rating: 3.0★
Ten films deep into a director's back catalogue and you start to think you know what you're getting. With George A. Romero, I thought I had a reasonable handle on it: sharp social commentary wrapped in viscera, monsters as metaphor, chaos as critique. Then I sat
Rating: 3.5★
Sometimes you don't need much of an excuse to queue something up. I came to Dario Argento's 1970 directorial debut for two reasons: Argento himself, and Ennio Morricone. And honestly, Morricone was the more pressing of the two. I genuinely consider him the finest composer in
Rating: 4.0★
Let's talk about practical effects, because if any film makes the case for them over weightless, pixelated CGI, it's this one. The Fly is the gold standard of body horror, and the reason it works so ferociously well comes down to latex, foam, and fake blood
Rating: 3.5★
There is a very specific, giddy thrill in watching Frank Darabont's creature feature The Mist and playing "spot the future television star" before they actually became famous. If you're a fan of the first season of The Walking Dead (which, funnily enough, Darabont also
Rating: 3.0★
Some films arrive with a completely unexpected key that unlocks them. I pressed play on Monkey Shines expecting a reasonably straightforward 80s horror thriller, and about twenty minutes in, I had one of those bizarre pop-culture lightbulb moments that genuinely stopped me in my tracks. This is the exact
Rating: 1.5★
When you sit down to watch what is supposedly a horror film shot in the Northern Mariana Islands, you go in ready to make allowances. It's an unusual origin for a genre picture, and part of you wants to root for it on that basis alone. I did.
Film images and data courtesy of TMDB. This product uses the TMDB API but is not endorsed or certified by TMDB.
The best new reviews, a buried gem with where to watch it, and where the every-country challenge is up to. Free, no spam.
Subscribe free