Paul Lewis

A retrospective article about Jason Freeland's 1998 neo-noir film Brown's Requiem, for Noir City's 'Under Surveillance' section.

A 30th anniversary retrospective about Carl Colpaert's 1991 neo-noir road movie Delusion, featuring interviews with Colpaert and the film's cinematographer, Geza Sinkovics.

Once a late night staple on UK television, Douglas Hickox’s blackly comic horror picture Theatre of Blood (1973) is perhaps best framed as a variation on the formula established in the Dr Phibes films, The Abominable Dr Phibes (Robert Fuest, 1971) and Dr Phibes Rises Again (Robert Fuest, 1972): in all three pictures, Vincent Price plays a vengeful man who is believed by others to be dead; Price’s character applies the tools of his trade in order to exact revenge upon those he believes to have...

The Living Dead at the Manchester Morgue

Revisiting Jorge Grau’s atmospheric 1974 horror film The Living Dead at the Manchester Morgue, one might wonder what happened to that once oh-so-familiar English landscape of Vi...

In Glasgow, twelve year old Lizzie Fisher (Heather Ann Foster) survives a devastating car crash that kills her young friend Kevin. Following a stay in hospital she returns to the tower block in which she lives with her mother, Kate (Stephanie Buttle), and toddler brother Alex.
Lizzie experiences strange phenomena at night – scratching sounds on the walls, at first, escalating to furniture moving across the floor. Lizzie struggles to convince Kate of her experiences, but when Kate encounters t...

An analysis of the five British horror films made during the early 1970s by Spanish filmmaker Jose Ramon Larraz.

In one of the most memorably gruesome scenes from Ryuhei Kitamura’s The Midnight Meat
Train (2008), a commuter (played by Ted Raimi, brother of The Evil Dead director Sam
Raimi) has one of his eyeballs knocked out of his head by a blow to the cranium. Dislodged
from its socket, the organ flies towards the camera in a shower of CGI grue. The perpetrator
is a serial killer named Mahogany (Vinnie Jones), who travels the titular midnight train,
murderin...

Paul A. J. Lewis
“Well, there’s a howdy-do.” These are the first words spoken by the Judge (Patrick Wymark) in Piers Haggard’s The Blood on Satan’s Claw. They are the words that open the film “proper,” following the pre-credits sequence, in which ploughman Ralph Gower (Barry Andrews) discovers the fiend’s partially-skeletonised skull in the ploughed earth, its one remaining eyeball staring impassively. We may reasonably assume that the Judge is responding to Ralph bursting into the home of Is...

Overall:
This is the first in a series of articles looking at Eurocult films from the 1970s and 1980s that focus on a theme of diabolical/demonic possession. The title of the series derives from the old maxim ‘Possession is Nine Tenths of the Law’.
This article looks at Elo Pannaccio's 1975 film UN URLO DALLE TENEBRE.

Overall:
Nine Tenths of the Law #2: Exorcism (Juan Bosch, 1975)
This is the third in a series of articles looking at Eurocult films from the 1970s and 1980s that focus on a theme of diabolical/demonic possession.
The international popularity of William Friedkin’s The Exorcist (1973) provoked a slew of European horror films about diabolical possession; peaking in the mid-1970s, this subgenre slowly petered out at the end of the decade before becoming increasingly hybridised with other ‘lowbrow...

Don’t Go in the House (Joseph Ellison, 1980)
After passively witnessing an accident involving an industrial incinerator, Donny (Dan Grimaldi) is criticised by his colleagues for his failure to take action to help his workmate. Returning home, his ego bruised, Donny finds his elderly mother (Ruth Dardick) dead. Liberated from his mother’s domineering influence, Donny remembers the abuse she inflicted on him as a child: flashbacks show Donny’s mother holding young Donny’s arms over the open fla...

Dillinger (John Milius, 1973)
After the release of Arthur Penn’s Bonnie & Clyde (1969), which emblematised the New Hollywood’s bold new approach to filmmaking, maverick American filmmakers became fascinated with the era of Depression-era criminals. Subsequently a number of similar films appeared during the early 1970s. Chief among these was John Milius’ Dillinger (1973), an AIP production that differed from Penn’s groundbreaking picture in its refusal to romanticise the violent outlaws at the...

Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (John McNaughton, 1986)

‘It’s always the same, and it’s always different [….] It’s either you or them, one way or the other’. John McNaughton’s Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer was filmed quickly, over 28 days, in 1985. McNaughton’s picture took as its subject the late-Twentieth Century phenomenon of the serial killer: it’s important to remember that the phrase ‘serial homicide’ had only been coined about 10 years previously, by FBI Special Agent Robert Re...

Shock (Mario Bava, 1977)
Newly-married couple Dora (Daria Nicolodi) and Bruno (John Steiner), an airline pilot, move into a house in which Dora had previously lived with her first husband. Dora’s first husband apparently vanished at sea, presumably committing suicide; after this, Dora spent a period of time in a psychiatric hospital whilst also kicking a junk habit. Dora and Bruno are also in the company of Dora’s son Marco (David Colin, Jr.). Marco begins to act strangely, and whilst Bruno i...