British Horror

Tony is as forgotten as the world he inhabits: the vertical slums of London, the neon thrall of the red light district and the murky channels he wanders when disposing of the bodies he methodically packages like meat. Thanks to Johnson's script and the stellar performance of Peter Ferdinando (someone please give this guy more work), there are plenty of dark, comedic moments in Tony's life. Things like his obsession with violent action films on VHS (he quotes First Blood to a victim moments before ... ), cleverly timed (and often awkward) conversations with people and corpses alike inject levity into an overwhelmingly grim reality. Complementary to this is Matt Johnson's haunting score, which punctuates every moment perfectly while remaining organic and unobtrusive. Similar is the photography which uses the natural light of the city landscape as its focal point. Johnson occasionally contrasts this with a more theatrical tone using the same naturalistic elements (a street sign, an elevator, etc.) and the effect is striking.

Ryan McDermott has been generating a nice little buzz about his award winning horror comedy short, Mark Macready and the Archangel Murders. The British producer, writer, editor and lead actor of the 33 minute film helped bring home the award for 'Most Original Horror Film' award at the Horror UK Film Festival last year and 'Special Commendation in Indie Filmmaking' at the 20th Festival of Fantastic Films. "We previously won a BBC new filmmaker award before this film. Winning that encouraged us to make the short," McDermott revealed during our interview.

Macready's story goes a little something like this: the detective wakes from a coma after being attacked by an unseen enemy only to discover that his wife Christina is missing and a monster known as 'The Archangel' has been slaughtering everything in sight. He makes the connection between his wife's disappearance and the monster, which sends him on a search through the supernatural underbelly of Manchester, battling ghouls and demons at every turn. Can he bring Archangel to justice?

McDermott plays the lead character of Detective Mark Macready and has been hailed as a "British Hellboy". It seems that director Sean Candon and company may have been influenced by other occult heroes while creating Mcready, such as John Constantine, perhaps a little bit of Cal McDonald or even the B.P.R.D. My immediate impression was a Garth Marenghi and Clive Owen hybrid, but enough with the comparisons already. If the film finds the right following, McDermott told me the team will be turning Mark Macready into a full length feature. "We really tried to change up the short film scene. It's all rape, guns and drugs here in UK."

The film's official website will go live in a few weeks, where you'll be able to watch it in its entirety. McDermott will be previewing the short on Twitter if it garners enough attention, and you can visit the Facebook fan page for other updates. For now, hit the jump to watch the trailer for Mark Macready and the Archangel Murders and let me know what you think.

Tormented first caught my eye two months ago when Trailer Addict posted an excellent clip from the movie that had me covering an eye with one hand by the time it was done. Now that IFC's Festival Direct program is bringing the British slasher to the US of A, we've got a full length trailer for the film and a slick little plot description on the Independent Film Channel's website:

"A sexy, scary high school horror movie that smells like teen spirit...with a hint of rotting flesh! From classrooms and cafeterias, to school ties and pool parties, teenage traumas full of promise, pimples and panic get a terrifying makeover as the best days of your lives become your worst nightmare."

The trailer definitely does a good job of selling the 'rich high schoolers up to no good' angle, so if you need selling on the horror angle I've happily embedded the aforementioned clip below along with the trailer. If Tormented looks like a good time, and I think it does, you can catch the film on IFC's On-Demand platform starting October 21st.

More horror movies come out per month than I have numbers for. Plot that out over a year and the number of titles becomes sheer cacophony. There is so much mediocrity in the world that a film must be either bolt-of-lightning brilliant or sack-of-hammers stupid to stand out amongst the din. The year is 2009. We've seen all we're going to see, right?

Tom Shankland thinks otherwise. Tom Shankland proves otherwise.

I'm not prepared to declare The Children "bolt-of-lightning brilliant," but it certainly is the most invigorating piece of horror I've seen since [REC]. That may not seem like a ringing endorsement, considering Jaume Balagueró and Paco Plaza's Spanish powerhouse is barely two years old, but if one considers the hundreds upon hundreds of horror movies that have risen and fallen between the two, I'd call that a pretty strong compliment.

From the title alone one can gleam the conceit behind Shankland's film. No one ever names a movie after the component of the story that goes smoothly. Something is wrong with the children. We don't know what, the movie doesn't know what, but something is going to go wrong with the children.