Jordan Peele’s latest horror film challenges viewers to consider technology, surveillance, other worldly life and the making of spectacle through different lenses — including the eyes of animals.
(Universal Pictures)
When it comes to our ethical duties to animals, representation and respect should go hand in hoof.
Arthur Rackham’s illustration of the Victorian poem Goblin Market.
British Library
Everyone is going ‘goblin mode’, but does the trend unfairly malign goblins of folklore?
Eden Lakes’s monsters are a group of working class children.
TCD/Prod.DB / Alamy
A wave of new horror films leant into Tony Blair’s Asbo policy demonising young working class men, portraying them as the monsters that society should be scared of.
Vertigo Releasing
A moral panic fanned by the tabloid press led to crusaders seeking legislation to regulate the home video industry and a slew of low-budget horror films.
SBS
Long past Margaret Atwood’s novel, the new season is increasingly violent – and the audience will find themselves increasingly numb.
Filmmaker George Romero at the premiere of ‘Survival of the Dead’ in 2010.
Ben Hider/Getty Images
Now that the whole world is echoing Romero’s films, everyone can learn from his legacy.
‘The Craft: Legacy,’ to be released this fall, is a remake of the 1996 teen witch film ‘The Craft’ and suggests the continued relevance of punk and goth influences for rebellious teens. Here, detail from the 2020 poster.
(Sony Pictures/Blumhouse Productions)
Some horror films explore women’s struggles for empowerment, sexual freedom and self-fulfilment. Six movies show the ghost, bride, mother, vampiress, witch and monster as guises of vengeful women.
Weird scenes from Jim Crow-era America.
HBO
By focusing on African Americans’ experiences of racism in the 1950s, the new series aims to address HP Lovecraft’s racist views.
Psycho/IMDB
Sixty years after it premiered, Psycho remains Hitchcock’s most celebrated film. But it is really two films, glued together by the most iconic scene in cinema history.
Decla-Bioscop AG
The groundbreaking German expressionist film Cabinet of Dr. Caligari premiered in 1920. It is just as shocking – and influential – 100 years on.
John Heffernan as Jonathan Harker in Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat’s Dracula.
BBC/Hartswood Films/Netflix/Robert Viglasky
Ever since Dracula was born in the late 19th century, every age gets the vampire it deserves.
Rural settings are often painted as scary in British folklore.
Travis Fultz via Shutterstock
The British countryside is supposed to be peaceful and idyllic. Don’t be fooled.
Lupita Nyong'o, Evan Alex, and Shahadi Wright Joseph in Jordan Peele’s Us (2019).
Universal Pictures
Peele’s films reflect the way many African-American directors have used the horror genre to reflect the black experience.
Watching with a parent, checking the facts, and exposure therapy can all help a child process a scary movie.
Shutterstock
There are various techniques that can soften the fear factor of a scary film: from talking about it to providing facts that contextualise the plotline.
bbernard via Shutterstock
Four spine chillers and a slapstick zombie comedy film to get you back out from behind the sofa.
A still from the film The Devil’s Doorway (2018).
Aislinn Clarke
Proper horror should be more than just monsters and suspense.
Image courtesy of Warner Bros
What is it that makes films about sharks so popular?
The Shining (1980)
IMDB/Warner Bros
Horror loves evil twins and doubles because of concepts like the uncanny and otherness. They also provide memorable images for movie makers.
Cut.
Kiselev Andrey Valerevich
From Dundee to Dublin, horror spectaculars are springing up like zombies from the dead.