Pulse (2001) – 25 Years of Digital Despair

02 Monday Feb 2026

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Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s 回路 (Kairo), released in 2001, arrived not as a conventional ghost story but as a premonition: a slow, suffocating meditation on isolation, technology, and the quiet extinction of human connection. Watching it again twenty-five years later, it remains both eerily prophetic and achingly nostalgic — a film that understood the emotional cost of the digital age before most of us had logged on.

Set in a Tokyo where computers begin opening doors to the afterlife, Pulse frames technology not as a tool but as a conduit for despair. The ghosts here are not vengeful spirits in the traditional sense; they are residues of loneliness, beings who have discovered that even death offers no companionship. Kurosawa’s great insight is that horror does not arrive through violence or spectacle, but through absence — empty rooms, abandoned factories, and human figures slowly fading into smudges on the wall.

This is a film that weaponises space. Corridors stretch too long. Rooms feel cavernous and airless. Characters drift through environments that seem already evacuated of meaning. Kurosawa’s camera rarely rushes. Instead, it waits, allowing dread to ferment in stillness. Few images in early-2000s horror are as indelible as the woman approaching in the factory corridor — a sequence that reduces movement itself to a source of existential terror.

At the time of release, Pulse was often grouped with the J-horror wave that brought Ringu and Ju-on to international attention. Yet Kurosawa’s sensibility was markedly different. Where those films leaned on mythic curses and narrative propulsion, Pulse dissolves plot into atmosphere. It is less concerned with why the ghosts appear than with what their presence reveals about the living.

The film’s central anxiety — that technology would not connect us, but isolate us further — now plays less like science fiction and more like quiet sociology. Kurosawa’s vision of a world where people retreat into screens, lose the ability to touch one another, and eventually vanish altogether, feels uncannily aligned with the psychic landscape of the 2020s. Social media, remote work, algorithmic loneliness: Pulse anticipated them not in mechanics, but in mood.

And yet, there is a tenderness to its pessimism. The film does not rage against modernity; it mourns it. Its characters are not punished for their solitude — they are already wounded by it. Even the apocalypse that unfolds feels less like an invasion than a surrender.

Revisiting Pulse now, one feels both chilled and comforted by its slowness. In an era of accelerated horror and algorithm-driven scares, Kurosawa’s patient, analogue dread feels like a relic from a more contemplative age of genre cinema. The film’s grainy textures, dial-up modems, and empty chat rooms anchor it firmly in the early 2000s, lending it a melancholic nostalgia alongside its enduring relevance.

The Prognosis:

Twenty-five years on, Pulse remains one of the most philosophically unsettling horror films ever made — a ghost story not about death, but about what it means to disappear while still alive.

A rare work that has aged not by becoming obsolete, but by becoming increasingly true.

  • Saul Muerte

Five years ago, to mark the film’s twentieth anniversary, the Surgeons of Horror team recorded a special in-depth podcast discussion on Pulse, exploring its themes of isolation, technology, and existential dread in the context of both early-2000s J-horror and the modern digital age. It remains a thoughtful companion piece to Kurosawa’s film — a conversation that deepens appreciation for a work that continues to haunt long after the final frame fades to black.

Hearts, Masks, and Missed Opportunities: Why Valentine Failed the Slasher Revival

01 Sunday Feb 2026

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By the time Valentine arrived in early 2001, the slasher revival ignited by Scream was already beginning to show signs of exhaustion. What had once felt like a sharp meta-correction to a moribund genre was fast becoming a formula in its own right, and Jamie Blanks’ glossy, well-cast but timid thriller stands as one of the cycle’s clearest examples of diminishing returns.

On paper, the ingredients are sound. A high-school humiliation echoes forward into adulthood. A masked avenger marks his victims with sentimental cruelty. A quartet of recognisable young stars — Denise Richards, David Boreanaz, Marley Shelton, Jessica Capshaw — circle one another in a web of suspicion and romantic misdirection. Even Blanks himself, coming off the more stylish Urban Legend, seems an ideal candidate to steer a post-Scream whodunit into the new millennium.

Yet Valentine is a film curiously afraid of its own moment.

Where Scream and even I Know What You Did Last Summer attempted — however commercially — to interrogate genre mechanics, Valentine retreats. Instead of advancing the slasher into the 2000s, it slides backwards into mid-90s complacency, borrowing the superficial trappings of postmodern horror while abandoning the intelligence that made the revival briefly compelling. Its mystery is serviceable but inert, its twists telegraphed, its structure overly reliant on red herrings that never generate true paranoia.

The central conceit — that cruelty in adolescence metastasises into murderous adulthood — should provide psychological bite. Instead, the film reduces trauma to a blunt narrative engine, less interested in emotional consequence than in ticking off victims one by one. The killer’s motivation is comprehensible but thin, treated as an excuse for mechanics rather than an exploration of obsession or grievance.

Blanks directs with polish but little personality. The camera glides, the lighting flatters, the murders are bloodless enough to appease ratings boards — and in doing so, drain the film of impact. Even the Valentine’s Day setting, rich with symbolic potential, becomes mere decoration: hearts, cards, masks, all deployed without irony or thematic weight.

What lingers is not terror, but missed opportunity.

The cast, to their credit, does what it can. Shelton brings a quiet steadiness, Richards an icy defensiveness, Boreanaz the requisite brooding ambiguity. Yet the screenplay affords none of them enough interiority to transcend archetype. They are suspects first, characters second.

The Prognosis:

Valentine plays less like a product of horror’s rebirth than a sign of its impending fatigue. It mistakes imitation for evolution, reverence for innovation. Where the genre should have been pushing forward — into new forms, new anxieties, new structures — Valentine clings to the safety of familiar rhythms and well-worn shocks.

Not incompetent. Not irredeemable. But emblematic.

A film that wanted to ride the coattails of Scream, and instead found itself stranded between decades — too self-aware for the 90s, too conservative for the 2000s, and ultimately too cautious to leave a lasting scar.

  • Saul Muerte

Lord of Misrule (2025) and the Beautiful Trap of Folk Horror

01 Sunday Feb 2026

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Harvest festivals have often provided a sense of eternal dread in horror cinema. They promise abundance, fertility, renewal — and yet so often conceal rot beneath the ribbons. Lord of Misrule arrives knowingly into that lineage, stepping barefoot into the blood-soaked soil cultivated by The Wicker Man, The Witch, Midsommar, and their increasingly crowded offspring. It is a film deeply aware of the terrain it treads, and for much of its runtime, that awareness works in its favour.

Set within a secluded village bound by tradition and silence, the film opens with a familiar yet potent inciting wound: the disappearance of the daughter of the town’s new priest during the annual harvest festival. From that absence, Lord of Misrule builds a creeping architecture of dread — one not reliant on jump scares or grotesquerie, but on the slow realisation that this town does not merely remember its past… it still feeds it.

Folk Horror with its Roots Intact

What distinguishes Lord of Misrule from lesser folk horror pastiches is its patience. The film allows itself to breathe within the rhythms of rural life — the rituals, the half-smiles, the whispered warnings that feel less like exposition than confession. There is a welcome refusal to rush headlong into spectacle; instead, dread accumulates in glances, silences, and the heavy implication that something ancient still demands tribute.

The concept itself is elegantly simple: a malevolent spirit bound to the land, sustained through sacrifice, disguised beneath centuries of polite ceremony. It is horror not as invasion, but as inheritance — evil not arriving from without, but preserved lovingly from within. This thematic alignment with generational guilt and communal complicity places Lord of Misrule firmly within folk horror’s most enduring philosophical concerns.

Anchored by Flesh and Bone

Central to the film’s effectiveness are its performances, which elevate the material beyond mere genre exercise.

Tuppence Middleton delivers a measured, emotionally grounded performance that anchors the film’s more ethereal elements. She brings a quiet steel to her role — grief without hysteria, resolve without bombast — allowing the horror to orbit her rather than overwhelm her. She becomes the audience’s surrogate not through fear, but through endurance.

Ralph Ineson, meanwhile, is perfectly cast. His voice alone seems carved from oak and grave soil, and he carries the weight of rural menace with effortless authority. Ineson understands folk horror instinctively: his presence suggests not villainy, but inevitability — as though the land itself has learned how to speak through him.

Together, Middleton and Ineson provide the film with its most compelling dynamic: modern skepticism locked in slow collision with ritualistic fatalism.

When the Earth Cracks

Yet for all its atmospheric command, Lord of Misrule ultimately stumbles where folk horror so often does — in its final act.

After spending so long carefully cultivating ambiguity, dread, and moral tension, the film opts for a more conventional and hurried resolution. The climax, rather than deepening the film’s thematic unease, simplifies it. What was once uncanny becomes explicit; what was once philosophical becomes procedural. The film trades unease for explanation, dread for closure — and in doing so, loses some of the strange power it so patiently summoned.

This is not a disastrous collapse, but it is a deflating one. The third act feels less like a natural culmination than a narrative obligation — as though the film, having wandered confidently into ancient woods, suddenly remembered it had to find its way back out.

A Worthy Addition to the Circle

Still, to dwell solely on its shortcomings would be to ignore what Lord of Misrule accomplishes with confidence and restraint. In an era where folk horror has become increasingly stylised and self-conscious, the film remains refreshingly earnest. It is not ironic. It is not detached. It believes in its mythology — and that belief carries it far, even when its footing falters.

Lord of Misrule stands as a strong, if imperfect, addition to contemporary folk horror. It may not redefine the genre, but it respects it deeply — and in a landscape crowded with hollow ritual and empty symbolism, that alone makes it worth entering the circle.

  • Saul Muerte

LORD OF MISRULE will be available to Rent or buy on Digital at: Apple TV, Prime Video, Google TV, YouTube, Fetch (AU), Foxtel Store (AU), SKY Store (NZ), and Neon (NZ). Own it on DVD at JB Hi-Fi and Sanity from FEBRUARY 4TH!

Brotherhood of the Wolf (2001) and the Prestige of Cult Excess

30 Friday Jan 2026

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Some films are not built to be loved universally.

They are built to be argued over, rediscovered, defended, and passed hand-to-hand between devotees. Brotherhood of the Wolf is one such work: a film whose reputation has grown not through consensus, but through cult allegiance.

Released at the turn of the millennium, Christophe Gans’ lavish historical thriller arrived wearing too many masks at once — period drama, martial arts film, conspiracy thriller, creature feature, political allegory — and in doing so, ensured that it would never quite belong to any single tradition.

Its very excess is the foundation of its longevity.

Prestige Casting in a Genre Disguise

What anchors Brotherhood of the Wolf — and elevates it far above most genre hybrids of its era — is the sheer calibre of its cast.

Samuel Le Bihan’s Chevalier de Fronsac provides a steady, rational centre, playing the Enlightenment investigator not as dashing hero but as methodical observer. His performance supplies the film with intellectual ballast amid its stylistic flights.

Opposite him, Mark Dacascos’ Mani is rendered with a physical precision that borders on mythic. More symbol than character, Mani becomes the film’s embodiment of the outsider — part warrior, part spectacle, part political provocation.

And then there is Vincent Cassel.

As the disfigured, decadent Jean-François de Morangias, Cassel delivers one of the film’s most indelible performances: theatrical, grotesque, and perversely charismatic. He understands the assignment perfectly. This is not realism. This is operatic villainy.

Even in smaller roles, the ensemble radiates seriousness of intent. Monica Bellucci, Émilie Dequenne, and Jacques Perrin lend the film a gravitas that most monster mysteries could only envy.

This is a creature film performed as if it were court theatre.

The Cult of Ambition

The film’s cult appeal lies not in its coherence, but in its audacity.

Gans refuses to restrain himself to a single genre grammar. Sword fights bleed into kung fu. Political intrigue gives way to erotic melodrama. Naturalistic horror collapses into baroque conspiracy.

At times, the film feels less directed than curated — a museum of stylistic obsessions arranged into a single, overstuffed narrative.

For some viewers, this is fatal.

For others, it is precisely the point.

Cult cinema thrives on tonal instability. The very elements that confound mainstream reception — the slow first act, the abrupt shifts, the indulgent digressions — become the features that devotees celebrate.

Brotherhood of the Wolf is not tidy. It is textured.

When Style Overwhelms Substance

Where the film falters is in its narrative architecture.

The mystery of the Beast of Gévaudan — one of France’s great historical legends — is gradually smothered by exposition, secret societies, and political scheming. The later revelations feel less like discoveries than like over-engineered solutions to a problem that was more interesting when left ambiguous.

The film’s need to explain, to mythologise, to systematise, drains the central legend of some of its primal power.

What begins as folklore becomes logistics.

And yet, even in its miscalculations, the film remains compelling. Gans’ visual command is undeniable. The fog-drenched forests, candlelit salons, and choreographed violence are composed with painterly care.

This is cinema that believes deeply in its own importance — sometimes to its detriment, often to its advantage.

The Prognosis:

Brotherhood of the Wolf earns its reputation not as a flawless achievement, but as a deliberate cult construction.

It is too long, too busy, too self-conscious to be great.

But it is also too ambitious, too beautifully cast, too committed to be dismissed.

Its legacy endures because it offers something rare: a genre film that refuses to apologise for its intelligence, its extravagance, or its contradictions.

In the end, Brotherhood of the Wolf survives not as a definitive monster movie, but as a cult object — a film that invites loyalty precisely because it never quite behaves.

  • Saul Muerte

Sasquatch, the Legend of Bigfoot (1976) and the Problem of Filming a Legend

27 Tuesday Jan 2026

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American folklore has always been haunted by what it cannot prove.

Unlike the fixed monsters of European tradition, America’s creatures live in the margins — glimpsed, alleged, misremembered, always just beyond the frame. Bigfoot, perhaps more than any other, is not a monster of narrative but of testimony: a creature sustained less by sightings than by the human need to believe that the wilderness still hides something unconquered.

Sasquatch, the Legend of Bigfoot arrives squarely within that tradition — and reveals both the power and the limits of trying to film a myth that survives precisely because it refuses to be filmed.

The Documentary as Incantation

Disguised as a scientific expedition, the film adopts the trappings of documentary authority: talking heads, field notes, expedition footage, and a tone of sober investigation. Long before the codification of found footage or mockumentary horror, Sasquatch positions itself as evidence rather than entertainment.

This strategy is not accidental. Bigfoot cinema has always depended on simulation. The myth thrives on blurry images, partial tracks, unreliable narrators. To present Sasquatch clearly would be to kill it.

In theory, the pseudo-documentary form is the perfect vessel for American cryptid folklore.

In practice, the film mistakes method for meaning.

The Failure of Authority

What quickly becomes apparent is that the film has little interest in tension, character, or even narrative momentum. The expedition exists less as drama than as scaffolding for assertion. We are told what to believe far more often than we are shown why.

The scientists, meant to embody rational inquiry, function largely as mouthpieces for exposition. The wilderness becomes backdrop rather than threat. Even the encounters with the creature are staged with such caution that they generate neither terror nor awe.

The pseudo-documentary approach, instead of lending credibility, drains the film of mystery.

By explaining too much and revealing too little, the film occupies the worst of both worlds: neither persuasive as evidence nor effective as horror.

Bigfoot and the American Imagination

And yet, to dismiss the film entirely would be to ignore its curious cultural value.

Bigfoot is not merely a monster. He is an American anxiety.

He emerges from frontier guilt, from the erasure of indigenous histories, from the fear that something ancient survived westward expansion. He is the embodiment of unfinished conquest — a reminder that the wilderness was never fully tamed, only renamed.

Sasquatch, the Legend of Bigfoot gestures toward this lineage without ever articulating it. The film treats the creature as biological puzzle rather than cultural symptom. It wants to solve the legend, not understand it.

This is where the film’s ambition collapses.

By treating folklore as a problem to be disproved or confirmed, rather than a story to be interrogated, the film reduces myth to novelty.

When Myth Becomes Tourism

Much of the film feels less like investigation than like travelogue.

The expedition wanders, interviews drift, landscapes are photographed lovingly but without menace. The wilderness never becomes hostile, only scenic. The legend becomes an excuse for footage rather than a force shaping the narrative.

Even the final revelations — such as they are — lack conviction. The creature remains vague, the danger abstract, the consequences minimal.

What should feel like trespass instead feels like tourism.

The Prognosis:

Sasquatch, the Legend of Bigfoot survives as a historical curiosity rather than a successful work of horror.

It is significant less for what it achieves than for what it anticipates: the long lineage of found footage, mockumentary, and cryptid cinema that would later understand how to weaponise uncertainty rather than explain it away.

In trying to capture a legend, the film forgets the one rule folklore demands:

A myth only survives if you never look at it too closely.

  • Saul Muerte

Wendigo (2001) and Larry Fessenden’s Quiet Place in American Folk Horror

22 Thursday Jan 2026

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American horror has always struggled with its own mythology.

Where European cinema leans effortlessly into castles, covens, and inherited superstition, American folklore remains fragmented — scattered across Native legend, Puritan fear, frontier violence, and the unresolved guilt of colonisation. Monsters here are rarely elegant. They are born of hunger, cold, isolation, and the uneasy sense that the land itself remembers what we have tried to forget.

Wendigo is one of the rare American horror films that attempts to take that legacy seriously.

Folklore in the Margins

Based on Algonquian legend, the Wendigo is not merely a creature but a concept: a spirit of starvation, greed, and moral collapse, born when humans consume more than they should — flesh, land, or power. It is a monster inseparable from colonial history, ecological dread, and cultural trespass.

Larry Fessenden, ever the scholar of marginal horror, understands this instinctively.

From its opening moments, Wendigo resists the trappings of mainstream genre cinema. There are no easy shocks, no baroque effects, no grand set-pieces. Instead, the film unfolds as a low-key domestic tragedy — a city family retreating to the countryside, bringing with them the casual arrogance of outsiders who believe nature is merely scenery.

When an accidental shooting ignites the film’s chain of events, the horror that follows feels less supernatural than inevitable.

Fessenden’s America

By 2001, Larry Fessenden had already established himself as one of American indie horror’s great caretakers — a filmmaker less interested in spectacle than in preservation. Through films like Habit and his later work on The Last Winter and Depraved, Fessenden has acted as both archivist and advocate for a strain of horror that treats myth as cultural memory rather than genre decoration.

Wendigo fits squarely within that mission.

This is not a film about a monster in the woods so much as a film about trespass: moral, ecological, and cultural. The family’s intrusion into rural space, their careless handling of firearms, their unthinking disruption of local rhythms — all feel like small sins accumulating toward punishment. When the legend of the Wendigo finally surfaces, it feels less like summoning than consequence.

In theory, this is rich terrain.

The Problem of Restraint

In practice, Wendigo struggles to fully embody the power of its own mythology.

Fessenden’s commitment to understatement, while admirable, often becomes a liability. The film withholds too much, too often. The creature remains largely abstract. The rituals feel gestural rather than revelatory. What should accumulate as dread instead drifts into ambiguity.

The central performances are competent but muted, and the domestic drama — meant to ground the supernatural — never quite achieves the emotional density required to make the horror resonate fully. The film gestures toward trauma, guilt, and moral rupture, but rarely pierces them.

When the Wendigo finally asserts itself, the moment feels conceptually powerful but cinematically undernourished.

Indie Horror as Preservation

And yet, to judge Wendigo purely by conventional standards would be to misunderstand its place in the larger ecosystem of American horror.

This is not exploitation. It is not entertainment-first. It is an act of cultural stewardship.

Fessenden belongs to a lineage of American indie filmmakers — alongside figures like Kelly Reichardt (in her own register), Jim Mickle, and later Robert Eggers — who treat landscape as archive and myth as history. He is less concerned with thrills than with keeping endangered stories alive, even when their cinematic translation proves imperfect.

In that sense, Wendigo is less a failure than a partial success: a film that reaches for something rare in American horror, even if it cannot quite grasp it.

The Prognosis:

Wendigo remains a fascinating but flawed entry in the canon of American folk horror.

It lacks the visceral impact of its European cousins, and the narrative control to fully harness its mythology. But it compensates with sincerity, scholarship, and a genuine respect for the dark stories embedded in American soil.

Some myths refuse to die.

Even when poorly told, they continue to haunt — not because they are frightening, but because they are true.

  • Saul Muerte

Troll (1986) and the Curious Curse of John Carl Buechler

21 Wednesday Jan 2026

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There are cult films, and then there are accidents of cinema — features that achieve immortality not through design, but through coincidence, misreading, and sheer historical mischief. Troll (1986) belongs squarely in the latter category: a film remembered less for what it is than for what it accidentally prefigured, misinspired, and became associated with long after its modest ambitions had curdled into kitsch.

And yet, behind the latex ears and ill-fated wizardry stands a filmmaker worth far more respect than this film’s reputation allows.

The Craftsman Behind the Curtain

John Carl Buechler remains one of genre cinema’s great unsung artisans. A gifted special effects designer who helped shape the tactile horrors of Friday the 13th Part VII, Re-Animator, and countless exploitation staples, Buechler belonged to that dying breed of filmmakers who understood monsters as objects — sculpted, painted, and animated by hand.

Troll was his directorial debut, and it bears all the marks of a craftsman promoted too quickly to magician.

There is, undeniably, a handmade charm to the film. The practical effects — crude as they are — possess a sincerity now absent from much digital fantasy. The creatures are physical. The makeup is tangible. You can see the fingerprints of labour in every prosthetic and puppet. But good intentions, sadly, do not summon good storytelling.

The Myth of the Boy Wizard

It is impossible to discuss Troll without addressing the elephant — or rather, the bespectacled boy — in the room.

Long before Hogwarts, long before J.K. Rowling, this film introduced a young protagonist named Harry Potter. The coincidence is so outrageous it has since become the film’s primary cultural legacy. The connection is legally irrelevant, narratively meaningless, and yet historically irresistible. In hindsight, Troll reads like a bootleg prophecy — a cheap VHS oracle accidentally whispering a name that would one day dominate popular culture.

Of course, this Harry Potter is no chosen one. He is a bland, passive child adrift in a narrative that barely knows what to do with him. Magic here is not destiny, but disorder — a grab bag of spells, potions, and goblin politics that never cohere into a convincing mythology.

What remains is not mythology, but meme.

Band, Bono & B-Movie Business

As ever, hovering behind the chaos is Charles Band, Full Moon’s impresario of low-budget fantasy and high-concept nonsense. His influence is everywhere: the tonal instability, the commercial opportunism, the sense that the film is less telling a story than testing a product line.

Troll feels engineered less as a film than as a franchise prototype — a world to be exploited, sequelised, and merchandised. That it eventually spawned the infamously unrelated Troll 2 only underlines how little creative coherence existed at the foundation.

Adding to the oddity is the presence of Sonny Bono, whose performance is less acting than cameo-as-curiosity. He drifts through the film like a misplaced sitcom ghost, never fully belonging to the fantasy world around him, and inadvertently reinforcing the film’s tonal confusion.

And then there is Julia Louis-Dreyfus, in an early role that serves primarily as historical footnote. She is capable, charming, and completely underserved — a future comedic titan trapped in a film that barely knows what to do with its own plot, let alone its supporting cast.

A Film at War with Itself

The central problem with Troll is not its budget, nor its effects, nor even its camp. It is its profound indecision.

Is this a children’s fantasy? A horror film? A family comedy? A supernatural soap opera? The film answers “yes” to all, and commits fully to none. Scenes of possession and body horror sit awkwardly beside slapstick and sitcom rhythms. Threat never coheres. Stakes never settle. Even Torok, the film’s central antagonist, oscillates between menace and pantomime.

What emerges is not a failed epic, but a confused one — a film whose imagination outpaces its discipline.

The Legacy of a Miscast Spell

Troll survives not as cinema, but as artifact.

It is remembered because of a name, not a narrative. Because of a sequel, not a success. Because of careers that outgrew it, not because it nurtured them. And yet, within its rubbery frame, there remains a faint trace of Buechler’s genuine love for monsters — a craftsman trying, unsuccessfully, to become a storyteller.

In the end, Troll is less a film than a cautionary tale: about promotion before preparation, about concept without control, about how even the most gifted monster-makers can be undone by a story that refuses to behave.

The Prognosis:

A curiosity. A footnote. A miscast spell that, by sheer accident, echoes through pop culture far louder than it ever deserved.

  • Saul Muerte

Mother of Flies (2025) and the Fragile Alchemy of Family-Made Folk Horror

19 Monday Jan 2026

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There is something inherently seductive about family-made cinema. Not merely collaborative, not simply economical, but almost ritualistic in nature — as if filmmaking itself becomes a shared incantation passed between bloodlines. Few modern genre outfits embody this notion more fiercely than the Adams family. With Hellbender, they didn’t just announce themselves; they howled their arrival, carving a space within contemporary folk horror that felt raw, feral, and authentically unpolished.

Mother of Flies, however, arrives burdened by that legacy — and perhaps undone by it.

Horror in the Blood

John Adams, Toby Poser, and Zelda Adams have, across their work, demonstrated a fascination with witchcraft, bodily sacrifice, inherited trauma, and the occult as something lived-in rather than merely aesthetic. Their films feel less written than unearthed, less scripted than summoned. In Hellbender, this approach reached its most potent expression: a coming-of-age tale steeped in pagan fury, where mother-daughter dynamics merged seamlessly with mythic inheritance. It felt dangerous. It felt discovered.

That sense of discovery is precisely what Mother of Flies struggles to replicate.

Once again, the Adams family retreat into the woods, this time following a young woman seeking salvation from a terminal diagnosis through dark magic and the guidance of a reclusive witch. It is fertile soil for their obsessions — body, ritual, desperation, the cost of power — yet the film rarely sinks its claws into them with conviction.

A Spell Half-Cast

Where Hellbender burned fast and bright, Mother of Flies smoulders — often beautifully, but frustratingly without ignition.

Atmospherically, the film remains tactile and sincere. There is a genuine commitment to texture here: the forest breathes, the rituals feel weighty, the blood not merely decorative but symbolic. The Adams family’s sincerity is never in question — they are filmmakers who believe deeply in what they are conjuring, and that faith lends the film moments of eerie gravitas.

Yet structurally, the film meanders far too long through its incantations, circling its themes without ever quite piercing them. Scenes linger where they should tighten. Symbolism repeats where it should escalate. What begins as hypnotic gradually becomes inert.

It is only in the final act — when consequences are finally allowed to surface — that Mother of Flies truly stirs. Here, the Adams family remind us of their potency: horror not as spectacle, but as reckoning. Unfortunately, by then, the film has already tested the audience’s patience too severely.

The Problem of Inherited Myth

This raises a more curious question about family-made horror itself.

There is something uniquely powerful about horror crafted by those bound not only by contracts, but by blood. Shared history allows shorthand storytelling. It encourages risk. It produces mythology that feels intimate rather than manufactured. We see echoes of this in other sibling or bloodline creatives — the Phillippou Brothers’ ferocious Talk To Me, even the generational echoes of Cronenbergian body horror.

But such intimacy comes with its own danger: when mythology becomes inherited rather than earned, ritual risks becoming repetition. Aesthetic replaces terror. Gesture replaces consequence.

Mother of Flies occasionally feels like the Adams family performing their own mythology, rather than discovering something new within it.

The Fragility of Folk Horror

Folk horror thrives on the illusion of something uncovered — an ancient story clawed from the soil rather than assembled in post-production. Once codified, once too self-aware, it becomes perilously close to costumed reverence. Hellbender felt dangerous because it seemed accidental, like lightning captured in a bottle. Mother of Flies feels careful by comparison — reverent, controlled, and therefore less frightening.

This does not make it a failure, but it does make it a frustrating experience — one brimming with potential, sincerity, and visual mood, yet restrained by its own solemnity.

Still Watching the Woods

Mother of Flies ultimately lands as a disappointment — not because it lacks craft or ambition, but because it fails to evolve the dark language the Adams family once spoke so fluently. And yet, to dismiss it outright would be to misunderstand its place in the larger arc of their work.

The Adams family remain one of indie horror’s most compelling bloodlines. Even in misstep, they conjure worlds few others dare to inhabit so sincerely. In a genre obsessed with inheritance, curses, and legacy, that alone keeps them worth following — back into the woods, back toward the firelight, back toward whatever spell they choose to cast next.

  • Saul Muerte

Mother of Flies is available to stream on Shudder from Fri 23rd Jan.

Paint-by-Numbers Panic: Primate and the Perils of Playing It Safe

13 Tuesday Jan 2026

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Johannes Roberts has made a career out of placing young bodies in enclosed spaces and seeing what breaks first. From the submerged panic of 47 Meters Down to the neon-lit attrition of Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City, his cinema is built on pressure systems: ticking clocks, shrinking environments, and protagonists perpetually one bad decision away from catastrophe. Primate continues this fixation almost to the point of self-parody, trapping its cast of college-aged characters in a chlorine-blue nightmare where fear, logic, and common sense all slowly evaporate.

The premise is lean to the point of austerity. Lucy returns home from college to reconnect with her fractured family and their long-time pet chimp, Ben. A pool party goes awry, Ben contracts rabies, and the animal’s sudden shift from domestic novelty to feral threat pushes the film into siege mode. Friends barricade themselves in and around a swimming pool, devising increasingly desperate strategies to outlast a creature that is stronger, faster, and far less forgiving than they are. It’s a setup that screams exploitation, but Roberts approaches it with the clean, functional competence that has become his calling card.

To the film’s credit, Primate is often tense. Roberts understands spatial geography well, and the poolside setting is used with a claustrophobic clarity that keeps the action readable. The director’s knack for escalation — another hallmark of his work — ensures that the chimp’s attacks arrive with bruising force, and the practical effects are commendably gnarly. There are moments where the violence lands hard, not because it’s shocking, but because it feels cruelly inevitable.

Yet inevitability is also Primate’s greatest weakness. This is a paint-by-numbers survival thriller that never strays from its template. Characterisation is skeletal, dialogue often grating, and the decision-making of the besieged teens frequently borders on self-sabotage. Rather than grinding the audience through fear, the film more often grinds their teeth through frustration, as tension gives way to repetition and contrivance.

Roberts’ fascination with teens in peril remains intact, but here it feels rote rather than revealing. Where his better work finds momentum in relentless pacing, Primate stalls, circling the same beats without deepening its stakes or themes. The chimp becomes less a symbol of uncontrollable nature or domestic denial and more a blunt instrument deployed whenever the film needs a jolt.

The Prognosis:

Primate is competent but hollow — a functional creature feature with flashes of brutality and tension, undone by its refusal to evolve beyond familiar rhythms. It’s not without craft, but it’s also not without fatigue. A rabid idea, executed safely, and ultimately remembered less for its bite than for how long it takes to let go.

  • Saul Muerte

Link (1986) — When Intelligence Turns Hostile

08 Thursday Jan 2026

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Released in the mid-1980s, when natural horror and animal-attack films were enjoying a second life on VHS and late-night television, Link occupies an unusual and often overlooked position within the killer ape subgenre. Directed by Richard Franklin—best known for his Hitchcockian leanings and his brief but curious detour into franchise horror with Psycho II—the film is less interested in primal savagery than in the unnerving implications of intelligence, hierarchy, and control.

The setup flirts with eccentricity. Graduate student Jane Chase arrives at the isolated home of an ageing zoology professor, only to discover that the household hierarchy has already been rewritten. The professor’s chimpanzees operate with eerie autonomy, while Link, an elderly orangutan dressed and treated like a gentleman’s butler, observes quietly from the margins. When one chimp is found dead and the professor vanishes, Franklin slowly inverts the power dynamic. Jane is no longer studying behaviour—she is subject to it.

Franklin directs Link with a measured, classical restraint that sets it apart from the more exploitative entries in the killer ape cycle. There is little in the way of sensational gore or overt shock tactics. Instead, tension is built through framing, pacing, and a creeping sense of domestic invasion. The house becomes a laboratory, and Jane its most vulnerable test subject. The horror emerges not from sudden violence but from the dawning realisation that the apes understand far more than they should—and may be capable of resentment, planning, and cruelty.

Elisabeth Shue, still early in her career, delivers a performance that anchors the film’s escalating unease. Her Jane is intelligent and resourceful, but never impervious. Shue excels at conveying fear through restraint, allowing the terror to register in hesitation and watchfulness rather than outright hysteria. It’s a performance that would foreshadow her later genre credibility, grounding increasingly absurd situations in emotional reality.

Terence Stamp, meanwhile, brings an off-kilter gravitas to the role of the eccentric professor. Though his screen time is limited, his presence lingers over the film, lending it an air of intellectual arrogance and ethical negligence. Stamp embodies a familiar horror archetype: the man of science who mistakes authority for control, and curiosity for dominion. His disappearance feels less like a mystery than an inevitability.

Within the broader killer ape genre, Link sits closer to Monkey Shines than to more bombastic entries like Congo or Rampage. This is not a film about nature striking back in spectacular fashion, nor is it interested in giant monsters or environmental collapse. Instead, Link taps into a subtler fear—the idea that intelligence, once nurtured and confined, may turn possessive and violent when its boundaries are tested.

When Apes Strike Back: A Brief, Bloody History of Killer Ape Cinema

That said, the film is not without its shortcomings. The third act leans into melodrama, and the film’s central conceit occasionally strains credulity. The mechanics of ape behaviour are pushed beyond plausibility, and some of the symbolism—particularly around class, servitude, and dominance—remains underdeveloped. Franklin’s restraint, while admirable, sometimes blunts the film’s impact, leaving it hovering between psychological thriller and creature feature without fully committing to either.

Viewed in retrospect, Link is a solid, thoughtful entry in the killer ape canon—more curious than terrifying, more cerebral than visceral. It lacks the cultural weight of Planet of the Apes or the grindhouse audacity of exploitation-era ape horror, but it compensates with atmosphere, performance, and an unsettling moral undercurrent.

For readers interested in the broader lineage of killer ape cinema—where Link fits alongside films that interrogate humanity’s uneasy relationship with intelligence, dominance, and the natural world—this film acts as a quiet but essential connective tissue, bridging prestige thrillers and pulp horror traditions.

The Prognosis:

A restrained, intelligent thriller that favours implication over excess, Link remains a peculiar but worthwhile footnote in the long, uneasy history of killer apes on screen.

  • Saul Muerte