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.

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© Photograph: Come and See Pictures

© Photograph: Come and See Pictures

© Photograph: Come and See Pictures

As violent spirits are unleashed in Sky’s Possession, observers see confident creatives reclaiming the island’s narratives in a form of ‘cultural reparation’

A woman opens a 300‑year‑old box, unleashing a violent spirit – it is the spirit of colonialism and oppression roaring back to life. It is a pivotal scene in Sky’s supernatural series Possession and symbolises a wider shift in Jamaica’s film industry, where directors are increasingly using the landscape to tell Jamaican stories – including those that confront enslavement, trauma and historical memory.

The series is about a biracial British lawyer who travels to Jamaica to investigate a multimillion-pound inheritance dispute, only to uncover a dark, vengeful spirit tied to the plantation’s brutal colonial past.

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© Photograph: Des Willie

© Photograph: Des Willie

© Photograph: Des Willie

How a Toronto shop owner founded Video Store Day and helped launch a scene

(slTorontoStar) gift link here Video Store Day 2026

The Guardian gets people to tell their best Brian Blessed stories. He believes in the cold! He protects the badgers! He made it pretty far up Everest! His voice creates its own weather system! He is fun to work with!

You can also read the Guardian's trove of Blessed content.

Virgil, Texas, isn't real ... It's a backwoods Brigadoon on the edge of exurban creep, suspended between the shopping malls and semiconductor factories of our modern civilization and the last vestiges of the open plains. Virgil is a myth, and like all American myths, it's steeped in the tension between our desire for freedom and the capitalist conformity obstructing our horizon like the drab, prefabricated metal buildings of which, as True Stories says, Texas is the leading producer.

Fans operate entirely outside the structural limitations that thwart even skilled industry technicians. A professional lab might make all the right archival choices only to have those compromised by a revisionist director or a studio's marketing needs. Fans, in contrast, answer to no one but themselves, which has let them accomplish what studios with exponentially more resources and infrastructure haven't: banding together to preserve and disseminate historically accurate versions of some of the most beloved films in history—an end-run around the rights and financial issues that hold legitimate enterprises back.