Penny Dreadful
SFX's high priestess of horror A new cult classic, kids getting tortured, and the best horror of the year so far...
A FAMILY AFFAIR
My favourite news story this month was one about a cinema in Australia which accidentally screened the trailer for Hereditary before a screening of Peter Rabbit. Apparently panicked parents were screaming at the projectionist to “make it stop!” while they lept to cover the eyes and ears of the traumatised offspring. Hilarious, and they couldn’t have chosen a better trailer to f-up with. Hereditary, out on 15 June (see our feature on p74 and review on p99) is extraordinary – it’s one of the best and purest horror movies I have seen in years, and I, as a fully grown and committed horror fan, found it extremely tough to watch. So bless those poor little mites having to watch a person set on fire, a child cutting the head off a dead pigeon with a pair of scissors and a teenager horrifically smashing his face onto a desk, with a nerve-shredding soundtrack and pervasive sense of grief and misery throughout (I’m still laughing as I write this). Hereditary is brilliant, and everyone’s brilliant in it (Toni Collette, Gabriel Byrne, Alex Wolff ) – it’ll be my horror of the year (A Quiet Place, I’m so sorry), but seriously, it’s not fun for all the family.
BLOODY KIDS
Teenagers getting brutalised in horror movies has always been a thing. In the heyday of the slashers of the ’70s and ’80s they were being stabbed for having sex, in the postslasher meta-horror era of the ’90s they were being stabbed for, well, in some instances not having sex. Teen horror this year has gone a bit dark, it seems. In Truth Or Dare, which some hated (not me, I thought it was stupid but fine) the teen protagonists are tormented right up to its very bleak ending for being a bit drunk and careless. The Strangers: Prey At Night (well made, dumb script) puts its teenage protagonists through the wringer for no reason whatsoever (which is kind of its MO), while the rather good Pyewacket digs down to the heart of the fractious relationships between a teenage girl and her mother in the most brutal ways. All three are directed by blokes in their forties, incidentally – millennial revenge fantasies, anyone?
LADY PARTS
In 2011, The Woman was one of the movies that everyone was talking about – a tale of a feral female kidnapped by an abusive man who keeps her in the basement of his family home and tries to civilise her (while also raping her), it was controversial but visceral, and very effective. Now, seven years later a stealth sequel has arrived, and it’s directed by the star of The Woman (and also Jadis in The Walking Dead) Pollyanna McIntosh – she’ll be reprising her role too. At the end of The Woman, she had escaped the house and killed most of the family, taking the two young daughters with her. In Darlin’, the youngest child (called Darlin’, in fact), now feral too, has been taken into a care home run by the church who are intent on turning her into a “good girl”. But the woman isn’t going to give her up that easily. The movie screened in the Cannes Marketplace, so expect distribution news soon!
GOOD NIC
One more for your radar, and believe it or not, it’s a Nicolas Cage movie. Don’t worry, no bees this time. Mandy premiered at the Sundance Film Festival to rave reviews (it’s at 100 per cent on Rotten Tomatoes at time of writing) and played Cannes in the Directors’ Fortnight. It’s the second feature from Panos Cosmatos, who made Beyond The Black Rainbow, and it’s an intense, bloody revenge movie with psychedelic notes that sees Cage attempt to take on the strange cult that kidnapped the love of his life (Andrea Riseborough). By all accounts it’s the batshit intensity of Cage’s performance that makes this really land, and I can’t wait to see it when it lands in the UK later in the year.