The Devil in the Details

Released in 2001 in Japan and 2002 everywhere else, Fatal Frame is the brainchild of one Makoto Shibata, who dreamed of creating the single scariest video game the world had ever seen. Inspired primarily by spooky dreams he’d had, along with a few brushes with the paranormal he claims to have experienced, Fatal Frame isn’t your average J-horror ghost story, incorporating aspects of folk horror, religion, and superstition alongside its central idea about a camera that can see things the naked eye can not. Obviously, it was a huge hit, otherwise it wouldn’t have spawned such a large franchise that still continues to this very day. Despite being something of a survival horror hound, I’d never played the first Fatal Frame before, and after a recent run-through of Fatal Frame 2: Crimson Butterfly, I decided to go back and give this one a whirl. Needless to say, this eventually turned into me playing all the way through the first four games in the series, and so now I embark on trying to g

After the relative disappointment that was Ringu 2, I was not looking forward to this American attempt at a sequel to Ringu. The Ring Two is technically not a remake of its Japanese sequel but that hardly matters when the story ends up going in such a similar direction. So, how does it stack up to either the original or the earlier attempts at continuing the story? Well, without giving too much away, I'll just do the internet clickbait thing and say: "The results may shock you!" But wait! I can't talk about The Ring Two yet! I forgot all about the short film Rings that's intended as a stop-gap between it and The Ring, that's usually included as a bonus feature on just about every release of the latter . Crap, let me start over. Rings, released ahead of The Ring Two, is a short film cum teaser trailer that remains something of a fan favorite amongst aficionados of this franchise. I've seen more than a few of them gushing about it on forums, fan page

When Ms. Mayfield, a schoolteacher, moves to a picturesque little village out in the British countryside for work, everything initially seems perfect. The scenery is wonderful, the people kind, and the living simple. Only our heroine becomes more than a little worried when she realizes that, gasp: Heddaby has no church. She becomes yet more alarmed when she begins to catch wind of horrible abuse being inflicted upon one of her students, putting her right in the middle of something awful brewing within the dark corners of this community. What is going on here, and what does it have to do with her ill-fated mission trip to Africa all those years ago? The Witches is an unassuming sort of sixties horror film. Dealing with a dark topic long back when Hollywood was still prone to conservative sensationalism, it was immediately intriguing, but I still found myself with little faith in it. A Hammer horror film that even Hammer fans don't seem to love or bring up all that often, and an app

After the backlash to Ringu's first, more literary, sequel, it was up to none other than Hideo Nakata, director of the original film, to save the franchise! And wouldn't you know it, without bringing back old characters or contradicting the lore of prior movies, he just  manages to certainly gets things back on track. I mean, kind of. Set just after the events of the original film (ignoring of course everything that happened in Rasen) Ringu 2 follows Mai Takano, a young girl barely featured in the original film, as she delves into the dense and mysterious history of the curse that took the life of her university professor and boyfriend, Ryuji Takayama. Of course, it isn't long before she's put herself in mortal danger as the number of unexplained deaths among teenagers begins to climb. Can she help stop the spread of the tape before it's too late?  First of all, the good: Mai Takano is no longer played by whoever the hell botched her character so badly in Rasen,

Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 has been a very divisive film since its release a suspiciously short time after its very successful and very intelligent predecessor. First, you have the camp who hated the first film, and thus have no taste in horror films, that claim this one is better in every way. Then you have those who appreciate that this film tried to do its own thing and thus, armed with excuses about studio interference, claim this film is a misunderstood masterpiece on the basis of that premise alone. And then you have most everyone else, who tend to view the film as a complete trash fire; something to watch with friends over beers and laugh at. Well, having just sat down and watched it myself, I'm here to give you the final word on this debate.  Ignoring any and all subtext, Blair Witch 2's premise isn't exactly earth-shattering: an opportunist from the Maryland area takes a group of hardcore fans of the first Blair Witch  up to the same places the original doomed

Created by one-time filmmaker Fabrice Zaphiratos with money from his girlfriend at the time, Bloodbeat  is a particularly rough-hewn example of the kind of unique cinematic passion project that I love to see. It tells the story of an endlessly dysfunctional family reconvening to spend a quiet Christmas together, something which is utterly spoiled by a series of violent murders that seem to be growing ever closer to them and their home. Though they're a much stronger family unit than they initially appear to be, can our heroes really get along with one another long enough to deal with the maniac prowling their neighborhood? Or will they be turned into mincemeat like their friends and neighbors?  The first character we're introduced to is Gary, a self-described 'good ol' boy' who spends his time hunting and watching TV with headphones in his easy chair. In one of his first scenes, we learn that he and the mother of this family, Cathy, are not married; just dating. Cat

European folk horror sure does give one pause to go stomping all over the British countryside. If you don't bump into pagan king Penda or a cult looking for some sort of convoluted sacrifice, you just might cross a hedgerow only to find yourself in a fantasy world populated with creatures of folklore. Someone probably should have mentioned this to David and his buddy Jack, the would-be heroes of today's film, John Landis's landmark work of horror comedy, An American Werewolf in London.   After an odd encounter with the locals in a strange pub, the pair are brutally attacked by some kind of animal, killing Jack and putting David in a hospital bed. Thing is, when David wakes up, he's told he was attacked by an escaped lunatic, while he remains adamant that whatever killed his friend was most assuredly not human. And another thing: he keeps having these strange dreams, and waking up in even stranger places, like the wolf exhibit at the local zoo. Something within him

Shot and released side-by-side with the original Ringu, Rasen is the 'lost' sequel that no one talks about. Well, at least, until now. You see, this film was doomed from the start. An adaptation of Koji Suzuki's Spiral, his original sequel to Ring, Rasen stuck much closer to the source material, which inevitably created serious problems when fans of Ringu showed up to see a sequel to the film they loved, yet were greeted with something almost completely alien. The situation was all the weirder considering the fact that much of the cast from the original film reprise their roles here, and that a number of details unique to Ringu ended up being brought over anyway. Add everything together, and you have a film that must have really thrown fans for a loop (no pun intended) back in its day. This must have seemed like no less than sacrilege. Needless to say, it wasn't a hit, and in the decades since its release, it has largely been forgotten by all but the most dedicated

The Skeleton Key is a film that's been waiting for me ever since its release in 2005, when I would have been seven. I saw snatches of it as I passed through the living room where my parents were watching, but the little bits I saw seemed so twisted and disturbing that I hardly stuck around to see anymore. Plus, I wasn't allowed to watch movies like that anyway. Fast forward to now, and I've been looking for some excuse one day to check this film out, despite hearing in the years since that it wasn't exactly a stone-cold classic or anything. Now that I'm on a folk horror kick, which was supposeably what this fell under, I was excited for the excuse to check it out and rewind myself back to the year it came out, when life was simpler and I was a lot skinnier. First off, by some strange coincidence I watched Angel Heart on the very same day I watched this, which meant I got a sort of whirlwind tour of New Orleans and a big dose of its folklore between the two films, o

Spiral, the sequel so insane the movie series has (mostly) opted to ignore it entirely, is a hard book to discuss. First of all, a lot of what I said a few days ago in my Ring review would apply beautifully here. Post-modern horror with veins of sci-fi running throughout, unfettered imagination, and odd narrative decisions: it's all here. Worse still, distinguishing the two almost necessitates spoiling both novels completely, but I will try my darndest to avoid doing so. Here goes nothing... Spiral opens with our new protagonist, Ando, beginning an autopsy on a fallen character from the original story and slowly but surely becoming swallowed up in Sadako's plot to bring about the extinction of the human race. This time around plotting is far more convoluted and bizarre in general, as her viral offspring has now mutated as a result of some gobbledygook, and the tape is no more, meaning the terms and conditions of the curse are now entirely different. The new-and-improved Ring