PRE-ORDER YOUR COPY NOW!

FIND OUT MORE ABOUT A NIGHT IN THE WOODS. CLICK NOW!

A Night in the Woods opens at selected UK cinemas on 7th September 2012 and will be available on DVD and download on 10th September 2012. Pre-order yours here.

It’s bad enough trying to escape from a masked slasher in the college grounds or a nice suburban American cul de sac. At least you might be able to find a phone… Although the chances are the line will be cut just as the emergency services answer. But now imagine that the boogeyman is out to get you and you’re miles away from the nearest hint of civilization.

Welcome to the dark and twisted world of wilderness horror pictures.

A Night In The Woods takes its unlucky cast into the moors and dank woods of the British Isles, where folk legends stalk the night, looking for unwilling victims. Here are some other flicks that leave the city behind in their quest for gory thrills…

The Hills Have Eyes

Wes Craven’s cannibal family thriller still has a vicious grindhouse edge, decades after in came out of the Californian desert to spite unsuspecting cinema goers. With a clan – based on a real group of Scottish flesh eaters who fed on unsuspecting travelers – who are looking for fresh meat and a white bread all American family stranded in the emptiness ready to be preyed upon, this is a fiendish exercise in terror from a master of horror.

Friday The 13th

A deranged killer stalks a summer camp out in the sticks. No one but a crazy old man who warns people not to go up to Camp Crystal Lake is around to help the teenagers who go there. Typically, they party and have sex, a bad move in a Reagan-era slasher as lax morals will get you sliced and diced. They never pay attention to the crazy old man in these kind of pictures do they?

Wilderness

You can’t do a wilderness horror article without name checking a movie that’s actually called Wilderness can you? A bunch of young offenders are sent for a outward bounds weekend on an cut off island. This being a survival horror movie, things fall apart pretty quickly as something or someone starts taking out the wayward teens. Nasty, brutish and very violent, Wilderness is a movie that flies under the radar but deserves more praise.

Blair Witch Project

We’ll be saying more about the connections between A Night In The Woods and Blair Witch soon, but for now this classic found footage flick deserves a mention as it manages to squeeze terror from the most flimsy of ingredients – panicked actors, some sticks and stones, noises in the dark, a few arcane symbols and little else. As an example of how to scare the living daylights out of an audience for the price of high end sandwich, Blair Witch is next to unbeatable.

Tagged with:
 

PRE-ORDER FROM AMAZON NOW!

TRUTH OR DARE

Arriving on Blu-ray, DVD & VOD 27th AUGUST 2012

Reports of the death of British film are of course always grossly exaggerated. While large scale productions tend to result in a preponderance of costume drama or forelock tugging royalty pictures, at the low budget end of the scale, we are still adept at producing great horror cinema that can stand up with the output of other countries. Here are some recent movies that make the point…

Wakewood

We’ve always had a talent for rural terror. The American’s have the backwoods – with the attendant cast of toothless hicks, inbred terrors and cannibal clans – we do well with olde religion and witchcraft. Wakewood is a rather unique offering that takes the central idea of Pet Semetary and places it a country village where the old ways still hold sway. Essentially, if your child dies, Timothy Spall with revive them, but they certainly won’t be the same.

Outcast

At heart, this a Werewolf flick and a very interesting one at that, featuring one scene of abject terror in which a social worker has her memory wiped by a Romany curse that proves that buckets of gore don’t linger in the same way as an original idea. Outcast deals in our urban blight, introducing a monster into an area where the poor have pretty much been abandoned to their fate.

Eden Lake

Horror exploits. Sometimes it shines a torch on a issue by scaring us into thinking. Other times it plays on our prejudices to make a buck but it isn’t horrors job to change the world so moral objections are moot. Eden Lake is a Chav-sploitation movie pure and simple and as an exercise in Last House On The Estate shock and awe, it does its job with admirable spite and indecency. If you’re a nice middle class person who fears that the tracksuited masses are about to rise up and steal your plasma TV and kill your kids, then Eden Lake has been custom tooled to stick a pencil in that particular open wound and wriggle it about.

Monsters

Sci-fi terror on a micro-budget, Monsters is a game changer that shows the world that imagination trumps bank balance every time. Take a couple of actors, film a road trip into an imagined alien contamination zone in Mexico on the hoof, get back to Blighty and fill in all the special effects on a commercially available computer for a fraction of the bloated costs that a major studio would expend. The result is a kind of indie road movie meets Close Encounters triumph of Sci-fi horror that will hopefully inspire many more people to get out there and make great cinema.

Mum & Dad

In typically British fashion, we took the US birthed Torture-Porn genre and added a new layer of grim, kitchen sink reality, setting the movie in a unkempt suburban house under a flight path. To cut a long story short, this is about a family of sexually deviant sickos who are always on the look out for vulnerable people who are far from home who they can abuse and kill for their own twisted entertainment. It’s a tough ride but it shows that the UK can take a stylistic trick from another place, re-purpose it and make it uniquely British.

MORE TRUTH OR DARE

DATE MOVIES FROM HELL

KIDNAP CINEMA

PRESS RELEASE

Tagged with:
 
 
PageLines Themes