Penny Dreadful
There’s more Conjuring, the ’90s are back and girls only want you for your body...
NIGHT AND DAY
Movie of the month goes to It Comes At Night – what a bleak, fascinating chiller this is. A horrible coming-of-age apocalypser, it stars Joel Edgerton as the patriarch trying to protect his family, holed up in a cabin in the woods after a vicious disease has wiped out great swathes of the population. With him is his wife (Carmen Ejogo) and 17-year-old stepson (Kevin Harrison Jr), until another family arrives – a man and his young wife and child – bringing with them jealousy and paranoia which threaten to destroy the lot of them. It’s terrific, but my god, the trailer is misleading. If you’ve checked it out you’d rightly be expecting some sort of grisly zombie movie. You might even have thought, “I can’t wait to find out what it is that comes at night!” No dice, it’s not that movie. Sad times that a film as sophisticated as this has to dress up as something it’s not, when what it is is so ace. Studios, trust your audiences!
GUESS WHO’S COMING FOR DINNER
Keep an eye out for The Bad Batch, the second feature from Ana Lily Amirpour, who made the gorgeous black-and-white Iranian vampire movie A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night. It’s not been dated in the UK yet but has been touring the international festival circuit (to mixed reviews). This is an English language cannibal Western starring Suki Waterhouse as Arlen, a girl who is forced to join a fringe group of outcasts exiled to a desert wasteland outside the Texan border. Whether it’ll quite live up to Amirpour’s fascinating feminist debut remains to be seen. But I like the idea that female directors seem to be owning cannibalism right now. After Raw (and also Polish cannibal mermaid musical The Lure), I love the association with women, sex and the desire to eat people. It’s there in Jennifer’s Body, it’s all over Claire Denis’s Trouble Every Day. And if Karyn Kusama’s The Breed sees the light of day, there’ll be more. So keep your phallic slasher films. Just watch out while you’re sleeping, we might just eat you all up…
I KNOW WHAT YOU DID 20 SUMMERS AGO
Ever wondered what Groundhog Day would look like as a ’90s nostalgia slasher? The latest from Blumhouse, Happy Death Day, sees teen Jessica Rothe re-living her birthday over and over again trying to work out who the masked maniac is who manages to murder her every day. It’s the kind of fun, high-concept stuff Blumhouse does well and the trailer looks promising – a hark back to the Kevin Williamson-era slashers of the ’90s, where good-looking college kids band together to solve a mystery while going to a bunch of parties and dishing out acerbic one-liners. Out next month, Wish Upon has a similar ’90s vibe (though more The Craft than Scream) where an outsider girl is granted seven wishes and inevitably uses them to be popular and cool and get revenge on the mean girls. It’s the 20th anniversary of I Know What You Did Last Summer later this year, so we’re due a revival.
It’s like Groundhog Day. Only with decades.
SHAPE OF THINGS TO COME
While we wait for Annabelle: Creation to land, and The Nun to follow in 2018, it’s been announced that the next character in The Conjuring universe to bag a spin-off is The Crooked Man – a gangly, grinning menace who appeared as an apparition in The Conjuring 2. Mike Van Waes (who I mentioned a while back, when New Line tapped him up to write a horror set in the world of The Wizard Of Oz – like the Wheelers aren’t horror enough...) is down to write the script, with architect of the Conjuring universe, James Wan, overseeing. Now that The Conjuring 3 has been announced, watch this space for further spin-offs including Old Bill, that creepy music box from the first film, and a sinister piece of toast that Ed and Lorraine Warren definitely didn’t like the look of.