A mortal twentysomething is caught in a love triangle with two hunky vampire carnival workers in a film with good looks but not much to chew on

‘Does this whole Edward Cullen act actually work?” A distinct Twilight feeling is in the air in this initially enlivening vampire flick, with willowy twentysomething mortal Gemma (Nell Verlaque) caught in the middle of a pointy-toothed tug of war between tender Italian hunk Sebastian (Alvise Rigo) and her bad boy ex Eric (Kieron Moore). When she strolls with her friends into a hot vampire carnival, the ab count nearly outdoes the haemoglobin one. But this good-looking whirligig winds up disappointingly disjointed.

Gemma is still regrouping after her father’s suicide, an unspecified amount of time earlier. So her mum is relieved when she takes a night off from grieving by checking out the local fair with pals Ryan (Corrado Martini) and Olivia (Pauline Chávez). Absent for many years, creepy Eric has apparently joined the circus, featuring as the ostentatiously self-harming Man Who Feels No Pain. But when Sebastian invites Gemma into the carnival’s orgiastic inner sanctum, she learns they are a coven of bloodsuckers who, under leader Toussaint (Jason Isaac), have a strict no-killing code of conduct. Or, in the case of potential initiates like Gemma, obtaining consent. “No means no,” says immortal softboi Sebastian.

Director Joko Anwar uses horror for social commentary as he skewers corruption and hypocrisy with likable silliness and raucous energy

Given the 2020s horror boom, Indonesia’s prolific Joko Anwar – who has worked more often in that genre than any other – should be better known. Using horror for social commentary, as Anwar has done often in the past, this prison-slasher-satire features the kind of scabrous broadsides against injustice you see in Bong Joon-ho’s films, and Park Chan-wook’s recent No Other Choice. But in skewering the corruption and hypocrisy of the director’s native country, it has its own likable silliness and raucous energy. As the inmates keep saying: this is Indonesia, not Norway!

Fitted up for the murder of his boss, who is found gutted and spreadeagled on a ceiling fan, timid investigative journalist Dimas (Endy Arfian) winds up in the slammer. But murder, immediately followed by the flamboyant flaying of the victim, dogs him wherever he goes: the prison hitman assigned to dispose of him is in turn found in the washroom rendered into flesh origami. Charismatic prison refusenik Anggoro (Abimana Aryasatya) takes Dimas under his wing; as the victims stack up, an apparently clairvoyant member of his clique called Six (Yoga Pratama) admits that all of them manifested a red aura, signifying anger, prior to dying.

London film festival
Anna Biller’s intricate tribute to the British 1960s genre plays melodrama for laughs and pulls it off wonderfully in a medieval tale based on a Japanese ghost story

There’s over-the-top … and there’s this playfully bizarre new film from US indie film-maker and genre connoisseur Anna Biller, whose previous film The Love Witch first alerted me to her ecstatic love of style, surface and the A-pleasures of the B-movie. The Face of Horror is a deadpan homage to the garish Technicolor horror pictures of Britain’s Hammer Films in the Peter Cushing 1960s, with an extraordinary visual emphasis on red velvet, whose Freudian significance can only be guessed at. Perhaps it’s not accurate to call it pastiche – in any event, the advent of AI has arguably undermined the value of skilled pastiche in movies and literature. It is more an attempt simply to make another film in the same vein as Hammer, to continue in the same rackety tradition of melodrama, eroticism and black comedy – and to create a film that can be laughed at as well as laughed with, just as they were at the time.

The setting is a cod-medieval England, a land of courtly nobles, smudgy-faced peasants and ladies wearing floor-length gowns with rope-style belts – although Biller has taken as her starting point the classic Japanese ghost story Yotsuya Kaidan, which is also an inspiration to, among others, Takashi Miike and Hideo Nakata. Edward (Jonah Hauer-King) is a handsome, unscrupulous knight, suspected of robbing his former master, seen here in the opening scene riding through a sun-dappled forest with his similarly shifty squire Richard (Leo Suter). Edward wishes to marry the blond, beauteous Eleanor (Kristine Froseth), who appears in a separate scene demurely preparing a preposterously lavish meal with her equally blond sister Beatrice (Ellie Bamber) in one of the vast, oppressive wood-panelled halls that Hammer horror was known for.

Emily Brontë’s classic is reimagined with extra stranglings, slashings and pitchfork impalings but plays it straight

Where pornography once trod, horror has now become the genre that infiltrates and apes all others. With a host of out-of-copyright cartoon characters recently grave-robbed for not-so-fresh IP, now classic literature is apparently fair game for a gruesome glow-up, in this case, Emily Brontë’s regular GCSE-botherer. But Becca Hirani’s laboured reworking makes the book’s gothic subtext crashingly, jugular-spurtingly textual.

As in the novel, wide-eyed Mr Lockwood (Ross Townsend-Green) pays a courtesy call to his brooding landlord Heathcliff (Sky Cheema) at Wuthering Heights. But this time, his sojourn is more like Jonathan Harker’s at Dracula’s castle; everywhere he turns, the shrouded phantom of Heathcliff’s beloved Catherine Earnshaw (Elle O’Hara) is lurking, and she leaves an extra dollop of gore on the windowsill in her famous nocturnal apparition. The tetchy host doesn’t do much to put Lockwood at ease – even before he’s trapped in the house by a bubo-inflicting malady. Between the hallucinations, the surly servants, and the weird absence of Heathcliff’s rumoured son Linton, he begins freaking out that it’s a different kind of moors story he’s stumbled into.

He cut his teeth playing rock stars and pretty posh boys. Speaking from his LA home, the actor talks about landing his first blockbuster lead in the grisly DC horror. Will it be too shocking for comic book fans?

Exactly 13 years ago this month, Tom Rhys Harries was hanging by his ankles from a meat hook every night. Playing a teenage rock’n’roll idol abducted by gangsters in a revival of Jez Butterworth’s Mojo, Harries was fresh out of drama school and the only unknown in a cast led by Ben Whishaw and Rupert Grint. The Guardian’s Michael Billington likened him to “an embryonic Elvis”.

Now the 36-year-old Cardiff-born actor has the title role in Clayface, a violent DC Comics supervillain blockbuster set in Batman’s stomping ground, Gotham City. This puts him in the company of fellow Brits in the comic-book universe, such as Tom Holland (Spider-Man), Robert Pattinson (Batman) and David Jonsson, recently announced as the new Black Panther. “I felt ready to do this,” says Harries. “Had I been younger, I’d have been suffocated by the insecurity of wanting to do a good job but not having that quiet trust in getting there.”

When influencer/singer/content creator Chiara King visits Copenhagen all the trips to trendy shops and fancy restaurants soon take a turn for the worse

British influencer/singer/content creator Chiara King stars as influencer/singer/content creator Chiara King, or some kind of parafictional version of herself, in this quease-inducing thriller exercise. The ick gets generated not necessarily by the eventual gore that erupts in the last reel, but by the tacky weirdness of the way the film apes the mannerisms of social media reels and streaming nonsense to both satirise the ugly side of the business but also exploit and profit off it at the same time. On one level, it’s an eerily clever exercise in bad faith, like a poor Michael Haneke film (think Funny Games) for gen-Z kicks; on another, maybe it’s just a crappy ripoff of online tropes that have been way overexposed already. Or both.

Anyway, here’s what happens: influencer Chiara gets invited to visit Copenhagen by a tourist organisation, a deal set up by her avaricious manager Alice (Jazmine Summer). Of course, this means practically every moment of her time awake in the city will be filmed, both by Chiara herself on her trusty smartphone, or a camera crew led by director Mike (played by Mike Nybroe, who is also director of The Influencer Project, ha ha); Mike is supported by sound man Daniel (Daniel Parmo) and cameraman Victor (Luca Storm). The early sections turn in all the influence-slop you would expect, with shopping trips to trendy merch vendors such as Baum und Pferdgarten, and meals at fancy local restaurants, and then a livestreamed visit to a “haunted house,” which is the big thing on Instagram and TikTok these days.

Debut feature from Ben Sottak provides outlandish Halloween-based scares, with Milly Shapiro superb as the naive yet resilient home-defender, Pumpkin

Home Alone meets Mad Max in this atmospheric seasonal chiller, named for Halloween and not a cheery greeting. A disease has wiped out most of humanity, leaving 16-year-old Pumpkin (Milly Shapiro) stranded alone in her rural family home in the middle of nowhere for the best part of four years. This classic American clapboard house has always been the perfect quaint yet unsettling place to celebrate Halloween, and she determines to uphold the family tradition and do just that, sending a radio broadcast to anyone listening to invite them to celebrate spooky season with her. Unfortunately, the message is picked up by some less than wholesome types, led by Thalia (Shannyn Sossamon), thus setting the stage for the proverbial to hit the fan.

It’s the first major screen role for Shapiro since her memorable debut as the little sister in Ari Aster’s Hereditary, and she is in almost every scene here, making for quite the showcase. It’s good casting: Pumpkin is an intriguing presence – at once young and old, presumably because she’s been fending for herself during such a key stage of her development. She’s not had any adult guidance since the age of 12 – arresting her development in some ways, while having to survive, be totally independent and grieve her entire family alone has simultaneously made her unusually tough in others.

The latest in our series of writers explaining their go-to comfort films is a tribute to Darren Aronofsky’s dark and unusually satisfying ballet nightmare

In early 2011, sometime after the film was released on home video, I sat down with mum to watch what she had heard was a “new ballet movie” by Darren Aronofsky. I was 12 years old, spending school nights training to be a professional dancer. Without any warmup, knowing very little of the ballet and pointe work that earned Natalie Portman her best actress Oscar, we pressed play on Black Swan.

Well before Brendan Fraser’s time on the couch and the many houseguests of Mother!, Aronofsky increased the wattage with a companion piece to follow his heavy-hitter, The Wrestler. Watching Nina Sayers’ (Portman) intense physical trials and her stilted sexual awakening, with my mum beside me, I was understandably disturbed. At this point in my adolescence, I thought Jumanji was a scary movie. Like the film’s injured bird, I was being introduced to a darkness I didn’t understand. And somehow I couldn’t get enough. Why did it feel so good?

There’s some effectively unnerving imagery and a cleverly icy dual lead performance but this kept-from-critics shocker is a bit of a jumble

The buzz surrounding the viral, limb-bending trailer of pre-Halloween horror Other Mommy was such that screen grabs became memes, official YouTube channel views ran up to 30m-plus and BuzzFeed used the extremely BuzzFeed headline: “The Lady Sitting Next To Me SCREAMED”: This Trailer Playing Before The Odyssey Is Scaring Moviegoers, And These Hilarious Reactions Have Me Crying.

Sure, Universal releasing it exclusively attached to the second biggest film of the year played a considerable part but the imagery was efficiently direct and frightening, a derivative scared child/creepy demon set-up turned into something that felt hard to deny and increasingly impossible to avoid. But then what had seemed like the surest slam-dunk horror of the season seemed to slither away. The marketing continued (there was a second trailer that didn’t quite break the internet in the same way) but the reviews never appeared, a choice made to hide the film from critics until the day it opened. It’s a strategic decision that implies a disaster, Universal eager to keep pre-ticket sales high (it’s predicted to win the weekend with $20m-plus) and bad reviews at bay. But instead, as is often the case, it’s less of a one-star train wreck and more of a two-star mess, likely to frustrate rather than enrage.

Metal band Gwar host this instalment of the horror series, which serves up darkly humorous movie morsels that would struggle to frighten a toddler

The latest in the long-running horror-feature series is, as per usual, a decidedly diverse ragbag of shorts, strung together with the thinnest of connective tissue. The theme this go-round seems to be music and sound, so it sort of makes sense that hosting duties for the interstitial bits fall to the goofy metal band Gwar, its assorted members met here cracking Halloween dad jokes in their trademark extravagant outfits.

The five mini movies vary significantly in length as well as quality. Flying Lotus’s stop-motion exercise Another Cabin posits a young boy in a rural cabin living with a mean old grannie who tries to push him forward when a tentacled demon tears the roof of the house in search of a snack. The characters’ resemblance to the cast of early 2000s series The PJs is slightly jarring, given this is such a different register, but the brevity works in its favour. In contrast Renee Zhan’s Dance, Dance, Dance, Dance, the opener, drags on a bit, but has a reasonable gags-to-gore ratio in its tale of murderous puppets taking revenge on visiting studio execs who would dare to “reimagine” some ageing IP best left dormant. The funniest gag is the bright major-scale title song the puppets (designed by Jim Henson’s Creature Shop) sing about how all things must die.

There’s no Leon, Claire or Ada Wong in Cregger’s adaptation. Instead, it re-creates something more fundamental – the strange, terrifying experience of actually playing the game

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I’ve been surprised by the number of Resident Evil fans complaining on social media about Zach Cregger’s cinematic adaptation of the survival horror series. “It’s not a real Resident Evil movie,” they’ve claimed. Were we watching the same film? Certainly, it doesn’t feature any of the familiar heroes – there’s no Leon, no Claire, no Ada Wong – and there’s a distinct lack of recognisable antagonists and well-known locations. Despite all of this, Cregger’s interpretation is one of the most accurate and interesting video game films ever made.

On the surface, it’s about a zombifying virus that gets accidentally released in Raccoon City by the Umbrella Corporation. These are, of course, the foundations of the Resi mythos. More interestingly, Cregger seeks to replicate and explore the structural and narrative conventions of the series. In the film, the player character, hapless courier Bryan Hodukavich, is thrust into a viral outbreak, with no weapons and no idea what’s going on. He is then submerged into an uncanny shadow world of escalating peril and body horror. The film takes us through a series of locations dragged straight from the games – an abandoned farmhouse, a road tunnel crammed with abandoned cars, a hospital and the obligatory sewer level. As he progresses, Bryan finds increasingly powerful weapons, from a handgun to an assault rifle – but he is always short on ammo. And there are typewriters in at least two scenes!