Penny Dreadful
This month it’s all about golems, devils, mothers and children
London Girls
My movie of the month, The Limehouse Golem is a gory Victorian murder mystery featuring a stoic detective, a Jack the Ripperesque killer and a beautiful young woman accused of murder who might just hang if the crime isn’t solved in time. So far, so generic, but fortunately it’s written by Jane Goldman and turns out to take an interesting feminist approach. Olivia Cooke plays the wide-eyed music hall star who’s been systematically abused throughout her life, accused of poisoning her husband who might just be the monstrous Golem who’s been terrorising the streets of London. Bill Nighy is the good-hearted detective who desperately wants to solve the crime and save her from the dock. But sometimes women aren’t looking for a white knight to save them. Given that Goldman wrote The Woman In
Black, which became the highest-grossing British horror film of the last 20 years, hopefully this will get traction and prove once again that women and horror do mix.
LITTLE DEVIL
From Eli Craig, the director and writer of Tucker & Dale Vs Evil, comes Little Evil , a comedy riffing on The Omen about a guy who reckons his new stepson is the antichrist, starring Adam Scott and Evangeline Lilly. After taking on the murderous Deliverance-style redneck subgenre in T&D, Satanic panic is ripe for a lampoon and this actually looks great. Horror comedy treads a fine line though. For example: What We Do In The Shadows: brill. Vampires Suck: bosh. Scream: class. Scary Movie: ass. An American Werewolf In London: cool. An American Werewolf In Paris: drool. Tucker & Dale Vs Evil was inspired by Craig’s father, who was a bit of a redneck but in no way a psychotic hillbilly – Craig wanted to show the sweet side of blokes who live in wood cabins. Here’s hoping he’s got a nephew who’s the son of Satan but is really quite a good kid after all…
Big Chills
This month, with the release of Annabelle: Creation , the Conjuring movies broke the $1 billion mark. Next month, it’s been announced, IT will be screening in IMAX. Good. Any chance to see a scary movie with the best possible picture and sound quality in a completely immersive environment is something I’ll jump at. So it seems odd that this is a relatively rare occurrence. People pay good money to go to scare mazes (Universal has announced new “Scare Zones” for
The Purge and Trick ’R Treat at their annual Halloween Nights event), so you’d think that going back to basics and scaring people properly, in the cinema, in surround sound, would be a no-brainer. Treat certain horror movies like blockbusters and you’re onto a winner – hire the best, shoot in IMAX, screen in 3D and promo like the mass-market experiential group-events they were always meant to be.
Mum’s the word
The first trailers and poster have landed for Darren Aronofsky’s Mother! , starring Jennifer Lawrence and Javier Bardem, and they are both tantalising and maddening. The trailer is creepy and unfathomable – all you can really glean is that J-Law and J-Bar live in a house, Ed Harris and Michelle Pfeiffer come to visit, and Jen isn’t very happy about it. The poster, though, is a very deliberate and direct reference to Rosemary’s Baby. Aronofsky is totally trolling us to guess what exactly the reference means, and okay, I’ll bite. I reckon it’ll either be Rosemary’s Baby’s Wife’s Baby – where Bardem is the now grown-up devil child and Pfeiffer is actually Rosemary – or Rosemary’s Baby’s Father’s Mother? Kind of like Who Do You Think You Are? but for Satan.