Anton Bitel

Scream VI is well-made, fast-moving and often painfully brutal, while peppered with the kind of sassy, savvy dialogue that has always been a hallmark of the franchise.

A child’s anxieties about what might be under the bed or in the shadows are also precisely those primal fears that fuel horror, ensuring that, with all its obfuscations, evasions and abstractions, Skinamarink strips the genre down to its most basic elements: a vulnerable individual alone in the dark.

The Pale Blue Eye is all at once a melancholic romance, a revenger’s tragedy, and an intriguing mystery. Its one problem, though, is that it comes with a glacial pace to match its wintry setting.

All the mad metaphysics come rooted in character.

Ultimately this story of a young boy’s emergence exhibits strong teleological leanings, suggesting that all our endeavours – even our apparent failures – ultimately have a purpose in a grander scheme.

Dolan ensures that such myth comes with a dark gothic edge, unnerving, insidious and uncannily ambiguous, as this clan’s internal problems find their expression in highly incendiary rites of Capgras cleansing.

In this oneiric oddity, consumerism is everything, ultimately devouring even the consumer – while the real horror is the exploitative means of production, carefully kept underground beyond the sight of bourgeois shoppers above.

The result is a luridly coloured, transgressively queered piece of self-conscious schlock where cutting is the business of lovesick killers as much as filmmakers – and both cut right to the heart.

Whether Archenemy is a tale of genuine urban renewal, or merely of power shifting without any real underlying change, remains tantalisingly ambiguous.

Director Ivo van Aart and writer Daan Windhorst weave the darkest satire. In essence their scenario pushes at the same boundaries between what is acceptable and unacceptable as Anna’s campaign, even as Femke’s vendetta shifts the argument from merely discursive, theoretical terms to the realm of the viscerally physical.

Carnivalesque both literally and metaphorically, it is a surreal affair, but for all its unnerving strangeness, the depressing subtext is spelt out very clearly.

This is a high-energy caper with lots of larger-than-life characters circling to kill, and two innocents at its centre about whose fate and very survival, against all odds, we are made genuinely to care.

It’s crazy and colourful enough while it lasts, but the fleeting diversions on offer from Sonic’s first big-screen outing pass too quickly to leave much of a footprint in the memory.

It’s a strange, mythically menacing journey through grief and the self-torments of guilt.

This finely-crafted, often affecting film points not necessarily to another sequel, but to a future where the Overlook and its eerie occupants have been frozen in time and locked away, forever and ever and ever…

Short yet elliptical and haunting, and keeping its secrets, this is an assured calling card announcing Godwin’s arrival in the horror family.

This is certainly the most stylishly directed of all the sequels. But still, its ironic self-consciousness about how tired its material has become does not ultimately make it any less tired.

Antlers is a slippery, troubling film whose ambiguities, despite one heavy-handed piece of exposition, remain intact even as the film’s identity keeps metamorphosing and body-swapping. Here, the beast within has always been there, lurking and latent as part of America’s constitution, and just waiting to bite back.

Based on Stephen King’s first published novel, from 1974, and in fact the first cinematic adaptation of that well-read author, Carrie dramatises all manner of first times, as Carrie gets her period, falls in love, and is ultimately penetrated, killing – and maybe dy(e)ing – in deep, deep red.