The early 90s saw a lull in the American horror scene. The great slasher cycles were coming to a close and it was still a few years before Scream would usher in the [...]

With Opera, Dario Argento hit the height of his powers – it was impossible to imagine him crystallising or apotheosising the giallo genre in a more complete way. [...]

As the title suggests, Four Flies on Grey Velvet is the most abstract film in Dario Argento’s first trilogy. Both The Bird with the Crystal Plumage and The Cat O’Nine [...]

Savage Steve Holland’s Better Off Dead is an anarchic gift of a comedy. Nominally, it revolves around teenager Lane Myer, played by John Cusack, as he sinks into a pit of [...]

Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance is the first and most anarchic film in Park Chan-Wook’s vengeance trilogy – possibly the most anarchic film in his career. On the one hand, [...]

With The Wicker Man, Robin Hardy crafted folk horror as we know it today – and he did it to chart the folk revival of the 60s as it turned sour on the brink of a new [...]

Manhunter and The Silence of the Lambs were perfect films, so there was no point in repeating them when it came to Hannibal, Ridley Scott’s adaptation of the third novel of [...]

Red Dragon is one of the stranger entries in the Hannibal Lecter universe. It’s written by Ted Tally, the screenwriter responsible for The Silence of the Lambs, and yet [...]

Like Yasujiro Ozu or Wes Anderson, Dario Argento has spent most of his career minutely refining one aesthetic worldview – that of the serial killer, a figure he has [...]

Manhunter was a horror masterpiece but The Silence of the Lambs may well be the greatest horror film ever made. In its emotional complexity, its beautiful command of [...]