Narrative Rigor in the Nightmare Labyrinth of Backrooms

By Andrew Kolarik. Something that has grown organically over the last few years from quiet beginnings rooted in internet memes and computer gaming…and is startlingly effective at evoking a kind of nameless dread…. The weird netherworld of Backrooms might be what Purgatory is like. Endless repetition of places and memories […]

There is No Time: Weird Currents in Mark Jenkin’s Rose of Nevada

By Thomas M. Puhr. Like their traditional method of travel, Nick and Liam’s temporal destination underlines Jenkin’s disinterest in sci-fi spectacle.” Time travel stories naturally conflate space and time. In such narratives, the non-present is like a location—the word “travel” itself suggests physical movement to a place either behind (the past) […]

An Interview with A Useful Ghost: Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke

By Yun-hua Chen. I think it comes down to absurdity. I’m not sure it’s exactly a genre, but ‘absurd’ feels closest.” Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke The combination of the seemingly contradictory concepts in the title, useful and ghost, is the film’s most ingenious device. What happens when a ghost obsesses a vacume […]

Cronus Devouring His Children: William Richert’s Winter Kills (1979)

By Robert Guffey. For no matter who eats who first, the grave swallows both father and son in time….” What follows is a brief excerpt from my latest book, Hollywood Haunts the World: An Investigation into the Cinema of Occulted Taboos (Headpress, 2025). This analysis of William Richert’s Winter Kills […]

Romance and Devastation: Looking for America in Closer to Home (1995)

By Ellie Dean. Unusually for a film (ostensibly) produced for the American audience—it is the Filipino perspective that is most often preferenced. The emotional authenticity of Ortaliz’s performance as Dalisay is consistently accentuated in long, thoughtful takes and intimate close-ups.” New Jersey. Mid 1990s. A gruff ex-merchant marine sits in […]

A Scholar’s Swansong – Italian Western: Rounding the Circle

A Book Review by Roberto Curti. A treasure trove of material, presented in an intriguing manner….” The title for the late Tony Williams’ final work (forthcoming from BearManor Media) is nothing short of appropriate: returning to the wide-open plains of the Italian Western, the British film scholar completed a journey […]

Preview – Dead Man’s Wire: The Justice of the Spectacle

By Efe Teksoy. The silence, however, is theirs alone — something neither the camera nor the system could ever claim….” Tony Kiritsis (Bill Skarsgård) takes a man hostage — and wires a shotgun to his neck. But that isn’t the first thing he does that day. The first thing he […]

Another Return to the Stars: Steven Spielberg’s Disclosure Day

By Thomas M. Puhr. At a time when genre film has reached new heights of creativity and daring, audiences deserve so much more from one of the greatest directors….” The story goes that Stanley Kubrick, in the early stages of adapting The Shining, phoned Stephen King one morning to expound […]

Unpacking the Military Background – War is Hell: Making Hellraiser III

A Book Review by William Blick. In addition to offering a production history, Stewart revisits an underseen and underappreciated contribution to the horror genre, in the military horror tradition.” Niche-genre critic and historian Danny Stewart explores the hybrid-genre entry Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth, produced by Clive Barker with Anthony […]