Posts by Chrissy Derbyshire

The worst thing you can do before viewing Wes Craven’s A Nightmare on Elm Street is to watch one of its sequels. It isn’t that watching the sequel first spoils the chronological flow of the story. No. It is merely because the sequels are predominately ridiculous trash. This can colour your preconceptions of the original movie which is, in fact, rather good. For A Nightmare on Elm Street is, believe it or not, a horror film. It is (brace yourselves) scary. Unlike the pseudo-scary, pseudo-comic franchise that grew out of it, the original film contains some memorable images, interesting plot twists and (gasp, faint) even a decent-to-good script.(read more...)

What's so surprising about the Hellraiser franchise (if we may call it such) is that no sequel is a repeat performance of its predecessor. No - forget the parentheses: it should not be placed on the same level as Halloween or Friday the 13th, admirable though these franchises may be. For each film has a fresh hell to offer us. Hellraiser's was restricted to one house: a contained, private hell. Hellraiser II takes us to greater depths, as Hellraiser's dynamic teen heroine Kirsty faces the Cenobites on their own turf.(read more...)

Judged on plot alone, Nakata Hideo’s Ring ought to be pretty tame. Indeed, this uniquely compelling cinematic work often comes across, on first description of the story, as a piece of over-the-top Japanese kitsch. The story of a cursed videotape that kills the viewer within seven days ought not to be this scary. Yet it has chilled and awed mainstream Western audiences, and almost single-handedly brought about our current obsession with Japanese horror. Arguably, it has paved the way to mainstream success in the West for the likes of Takashi Miike and others. The point is that the art of terror revolves around context. That old campfire chestnut in which a ghost hunts down the liver stolen by a schoolboy from his now uninhabited corpse looks ridiculous on paper.(read more...)

From start to finish, I watched this film with my jaw dropped in disbelief. This is not an unusual reaction for me and it can mean many things. It can mean that I am witnessing the most spectacular pile of crap the world has ever known. It can mean, equally well, that I have just seen a person’s brain eaten in close-up, and I would rather not have. On rare occasions, it may be because the movie is, in fact, stunningly brilliant. But why did Lucky McKee’s May elicit such a reaction? Yes, it is gory (think blind children crawling over broken glass) and yes, it is brilliant. Most of all though, the film, like May herself, is weird. "I like weird," say two of the film’s (doomed) characters. You have no idea.(read more...)