“Ya see, when a man bleeds, it’s just tissue, but blood from one of you Things won’t obey when it’s attacked. It’ll try and survive… crawl away from a hot needle, say.”
Author: Jez Conolly
Jez has contributed to numerous film-related books, magazines and websites. He has co-edited three books in Intellect's World Film Locations series, covering Dublin, Reykjavik and Liverpool and has contributed pieces to many more volumes in the series. His monograph on John Carpenter's The Thing in Auteur's Devil's Advocates series of books was published in 2013. He is currently working on another book in the same series, concerning Ealing Studios' Dead of Night.
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Thousand Words: O Dreamland
Jez Conolly plonks his deckchair on the beach, rolls up his trouser legs and dips his toes into Lindsay Anderson’s O Dreamland, a game-changing look at the British seaside holiday. Films set in British seaside holiday resorts make for an interesting point of comparison if one is seeking to chart the course of national identity […]
(Minnie) “Oh, before I forget, this is for you from Roman and me. It’s just a little present is all. For moving in… It’s real old, over 300 years… The green inside is tannis root. That’s for good luck.” (Rosemary) “It’s lovely, but I… I can’t accept it.” (Minnie) “You already have. Put it on. […]
If you’re looking for the perfect antidote to yet another Christmas cooped up for days on end with family members you don’t get on with, we would direct you to seek out a copy of The Young Poisoner’s Handbook, a dark little gem from the mid-90s, although you’re currently limited to a heftily priced US […]
The death of Babs Milligan (Anna Massey) at the hands of Neck Tie Murderer Bob Rusk (Barry Foster) in Hitchcock’s Frenzy is arguably the Master of Suspense’s last great sequence. And it’s all the more effectively chilling for its relative restraint. About half an hour earlier in the film we had been witness to the […]
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Widescreen: The Hellfire Video Club
Bristol’s Cube Microplex, tucked away off King’s Square close to the city centre, has been banging the drum for Alternative Cinema in all its varied forms for many years. One regular programme entry is the Hellfire Video Club which seeks to screen some of the more esoteric videotape releases of yesteryear for the edification of […]
Cinema’s backlot is simply littered with severed fingers. They’ve been tenderised with hammers in Casino (Martin Scorsese, 1995) and Kill List (Ben Wheatley, 2011), become the natural stage one amputation in such Torture Porn tours de force as Hostel (Eli Roth, 2005) and Wolf Creek (Greg McLean, 2005) and have been bloodily obliterated in the urban shoot-outs of Taxi Driver (Martin Scorsese, 1976) and Robocop (Paul Verhoeven, […]
Stoker is a film replete with significance and meaning imposed on the positioning of its characters within the frame. A scene on a winding staircase at around 12 minutes neatly captures the moment when a crucial shift in power between India (Mia Wasikowska) and Uncle Charlie (Matthew Goode) occurs. Louis Giannetti, in his hardy perennial film […]
In attempting to scare the grey flannel trousers off its original 1950s audience, Jacques Tourneur’s deliciously dark little frightener Night of the Demon, based on the M. R. James story Casting the Runes, employed a number of devices to instil fear – the effectiveness of the stick puppet demon itself, insisted on by executive producer […]