Alexandra Heller-Nicholas books some time off, packs her camping gear and heads off on a horror holiday, but will she make it back alive? The dream-holiday-gone-wrong is a staple horror trope: where would films like the Hostel or Wolf Creek franchises be without their legions of wide-eyed young people whose dreams of seeing the world […]
Tag: holidays
Everyone dreams about travelling the world and seeing the sights, and in Amelie, as Georgina Guthrie tells us, a very unusual globetrotter got to do just that. Fairy tales inform us that the gnome is a reclusive figure, content to hide in the safety of his underground burrow. How apt, then, that suburbia adopted him […]
Kieron Moore looks on in horror as a romantic caravanning holiday in the north of England descends into violent mayhem in Ben Wheatley’s idiosyncratic black comedy. What would Terence Malick’s Badlands (1973) be like were it set around the tourist spots of Northern England? It’s an unusual pitch, but the answer is Sightseers (Ben Wheatley, […]
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 […]