this month: supernatural unease

Inside the weird and wacky world of DTV

Daguerrotype, a French movie from Japanese master Kiyoshi Kurosawa, quietly mixes noir, spookiness and a fascination with the fetish trappings of 19th-century photo-portraiture. A photographer’s assistant convinces his employer’s daughter/model to pose as her own ghost to convince him to sell an old, dark house to a property developer. But is there a real spectre in the frame? A slow-burn, understated melodrama, it finishes with a satisfyingly creepy pay-off. Samuel Galli’s stylish, shocking Our Evil, meanwhile, has a tormented psychic hiring a serial killer as a hit man in an attempt to exorcise literal demons gathering around his innocent daughter. Be warned, this intense Brazilian movie includes extremely gruesome scenes, but is as magical and strange as it is twisted and horrific. Griff Furst’s Florida-set noir/ ghost story/small town soap Cold Moon opens with a sweet teenage girl dumped in the river. A murder investigation uncovers hideous abuse, corrupt business practices and supernatural horror, which might be why the credits stress that Michael Mcdowell’s (excellent) source novel Cold Moon Over Babylon was published in 1980, well before Laura Palmer got wrapped in plastic. Bad banker Josh Stewart is splendidly nasty, and the snake-woman apparitions are startling. George Popov and Jonathan Russell’s low-budget folk horror Hex, set in the English Civil War, could be pitched as A Field In England meets The Witch as Roundhead and Cavalier soldiers, lost in the woods after a battle, are forced to team up against a curse-casting woman — leading to an unexpected, blunt, powerful finish.