Séance (2000)

Kiyoshi Kurosawa knows how to make a ghost an eerie presence within a frame. Simple and effective in design. A blur where a face should be. An identifying colour in their clothing. Something that registers the eye eventually as they emerge from a shadow or appear in the visual dimension. They don’t seem aggressive in […]

Opera (1987)

POV: You love the opera! And you’re a psycho murderer! Great to finally catch up with Dario Argento’s horror thriller, Opera (1987). A ingenue opera singer, Betty (Cristina Marsillach), gets her big break when the original lead to a production of Verdi’s Macbeth suffers an accident. As the gothic production, which uses live ravens during […]

Death Spa (1989)

NEWBODY HEALTH SPA ⚡️ ⚡️ ⚡️ ⚡️ D EA TH SPA Death Spa (1989) – a perfect title! Completely indicates the type of horror movie it is, and if you hadn’t guessed, it’s a cash-in on the aerobics and gym craze of the 1980s. As if some producer […]

Stage Fright: Aquarius (1987)

The killer wears an owl’s head mask. A bulky, feathery mask with dark eyes and a beak. What a fantastic look! And now imagine an actor wearing that owl’s head with a suit and flying through the air on stage during rehearsal for a musical rock number. This happens in the first five minutes of […]

Pulse (2001)

I don’t know how director Kiyoshi Kurosawa and his collaborators pull this off, but in an opening sequence of Pulse (2001) where we observe a young woman visit a friend’s apartment, cutting from her travel in a bus interior to walking down a street to walking up the apartment block stairs, all of this is […]