The Big Picture Magazine
It’s become somewhat of a British horror tradition to have a plot based around local country bumpkin-satanist types. Elliot Golder’s found-footage debut The Borderlands, with its unfriendly villagers and sheep-burning teenagers, certainly looks as if it’s going that way. It’s quick to pay homage to Kill List (Ben Wheatley, 2011) but swiftly skirts the local […]
What’s Your Favourite Scary Movie? Here at The Big Picture HQ, we thought it would be fun to ask some of our regular contributors what their top ten favourite horror movies are. Do you agree with our writers’ choices? Mark Fletcher Horror has been a staple part of my movie watching since I was a […]
The zombie film was, to excuse the pun, a sub-genre that had flatlined at the turn of the century. Movies thrown together by hacks with low budgets and even lower ambitions had consigned the undead to the DVD shelves. What this sub-section of horror needed was an injection of life, and British genre-spanning director Danny […]
A Big Wheel tricycle. The epitome of American 1970s childhood; a bastion of good, clean fun and innocence, and staple toy of choice for the all-American kid. To see it is to imagine wide, tree-lined streets, fresh air and mom’s laundry drying out in the sun. Yet here, in Kubrick’s Overlook Hotel, the tricycle is […]
Psychological horror has long been the neglected offspring of a genre that too often falls back on lazy shocks, recycled storylines and dismembered body parts. Yet, it’s through this underused sub-genre that some of horror’s finest hours have emerged, not least of which the largely forgotten Jacob’s Ladder. Directed by Adrian Lyne, Jacob’s Ladder may […]
Through the years, science fiction posters and subtlety have not been the best of pairings. Forbidden Planet gave us one of many over-saturated and melodramatic visual spectacles: the eye-catching (if absent from the film) scene of Robbie the Robot kidnapping a scantily-clad woman, and the word ‘AMAZING!’ stamped on top. Star Wars started a trend […]
Picture this: it’s been a long day and you’ve been driving since early morning. Suddenly, just off the highway, you notice a motel and decide to stop for the night. After booking in and passing the time of day with the young owner (he seems a little odd but, as he’s alone, it would be […]
Architecture, like film, acts at many scales. Suspense cinema in particular exploits this superbly, beginning with the smallest – the room. The four walls which surround us for most of the day are our world for those hours. But as much as they are just walls, they are also screens on which we project our […]