The Cutprice Guignol

Pillion’s love story ends where most of cinema would begin: with a kiss.

And by “all these years”, I mean 1981, and by “do it for each other”, I mean “be as nasty, gnarly, and gross a splatter film as to have me cringing and squirming in the cinema just like I did the first time around”. Which is a slightly convoluted way of saying – damn, Evil Dead Burn is great.

It’s twenty years since Park Chan-Wook released the legendary revenge thriller Oldboy – and I went back to watch it again and find out if it’s still as shocking as it was when it first dropped.

In Phoenix, Arizona, on the evening of 11th January 2003, Brandon Carl Vedas sat down in his bedroom, switched on his webcam, and livestreamed his own fatal overdose.

Happy Friday 🌼

Sometimes, it feels like the best way to go into a Shakespeare adaptation is to do your homework first, and that’s not always the most appealing way to approach a movie, you know?

A young woman can be murderous, but God forbid she’s ugly and fat while she does it, you know?

On 5th January, 2002, denizens of the internet were prepared for a show they would never forget. And the star of that show was Paul Morgan, a thirty-three-year-old American man who had suffered a serious spinal injury fifteen years earlier. Morgan had spent the better part of the last year fundraising to reach a hefty target to fund the events of his livestream – during which, according to Morgan, he would cut off his own feet with a homemade guillotine in front of hundreds of viewers. 

On May 13th, 1983, Andy Mould and Peter Dooley arrived expected nothing but a normal day of work. The last thing on their minds was discovering human remains – but, by the day’s end, they would discover a human head buried in the Lindow Moss bog that would go on to irrevocably change the course of a twenty-year-long missing person’s case, despite the fact it was nearly two millennia old.

It’s been just over a decade since American Mary came out, and I have some thoughts of the Soska Sisters iconic body horror gorefest.

Woman of the year

A woman paranoid about being buried alive after witnessing her living brother’s near-internment, an eccentric local doctor, and a mummy that would haunt Manchester (literally and figuratively) for centuries – let’s about about Hannah Beswick, the Mummy of Manchester.

The image is, arguably, one of the most iconic in the history of folklore and horror alike: the Hungarian Countess Elizabeth Báthory bathing in the blood of one of the hundreds of servant girls she murdered, intent on using their gore to preserve her own youth and beauty. Sharing a bloodline with Vlad the Impaler and Dracula alike, this version of Báthory remains one of the most infamous female serial killers in history – and, with a claimed body count of more than 650 victims, one of the most prolific of all time, too.