> Ageing and death are perhaps the foundation of all horror, but this droll French chamber piece, adapted from an 1839 novella by Aleksey Tolstoy, puts a devious spin on that. The titular “vourdalak” – a kind of Mitteleuropean vampire – is Gorcha, wizened patriarch of a family of forest-dwelling peasants, who is driven to feed on the blood of those he loves the most. With the film incarnating this beastie in the form of a toothy puppet resembling Norman Tebbit (voiced by director Adrian Beau), it’s a cruel but funny metaphor for parental authority and late-life dependency. Obviously they didn’t have assisted living in early modern Bohemia. > > ... > > Beau could have adapted this as straight gothic. Instead, he opts for an enjoyable high-strung comedy that, with him often shooting through Hammer-style soft gauze, skims pastiche. D’Urfé’s court manners are ridiculously superfluous in the rustic setting, exposed as hypocritical when he roughly pursues Sdenka, and then redundant in the face of the ghoulish paterfamilias scoffing at him down the dinner table.

Trailer

IMDb

cross-posted from: https://feddit.uk/post/16589411

> > The old eat the young. That is the back-of-a-beermat pitch for new Channel 4 drama Generation Z. And because the Z stands for zombie, the eating is meant literally. “I loved the idea of a horror story about societal breakdown, told from the perspective of different generations,” says its writer-director Ben Wheatley. “Once I started writing it, I couldn’t stop.” > > > >The film-maker’s first original series for TV begins with an army convoy crashing outside a care home. The subsequent chemical leak turns the residents into marauding monsters who attack local youngsters. “It’s a bit of a Brexit metaphor,” admits Wheatley. “But it’s by no means binary. We discuss it from each generation’s viewpoint, exploring the notion that boomers have ruined the lives of the young. Because it’s a genre piece, that’s basically by biting their hands and eating their brains.” > > > > ... > > > > “I love telly and watch a lot of it – Battlestar Galactica, The Sopranos and Deadwood were the golden age for me – so I was keen to play with a different train set,” he says. “It was exciting to write in longer form, rather than the sprint that is a film script. In terms of production values and cinematic scale, TV has closed the gap on film. It’s like the difference between a single and an album. Actors move freely between the two now. The skillset’s no different. Any stigma has long gone.” > > > > Fittingly for a series punctuated by gruesome deaths, he’s assembled a killer cast. Playing the pensioners are veterans such as Sue Johnston and Anita Dobson. “Sue’s first day on set, she was biting someone’s nose off,” he says. “They got to do stuff they don’t usually do, running around covered in gore, and had a blast doing it.” The gore is created the old-fashioned way. “Everything is practical, with prosthetics or models. There are very few CG effects. When arms are ripped off and blood spurts, there are people pumping plasma just out of shot. We use jelly when organs need to be edible. It’s all very visceral.” > > > > ... > > > > Generation Z is coming to Channel 4 this autumn.

cross-posted from: https://feddit.uk/post/16563475

> > John Carpenter's The Thing as performed by the claymated, Antarctic cast of the hit children's animation Pingu. > > IMDb

cross-posted from: https://feddit.uk/post/16411743

> > The first trailer for new vampire thriller The Radleys, starring Line of Duty's Kelly Macdonald, has been released. > > > >Adapted from Matt Haig's novel of the same name, the film centres around a married couple who are hiding a dark secret from their children: they're vampires. > > > > The film will receive its world premiere at the upcoming Edinburgh International Film Festival on Tuesday, August 20. Sky has also confirmed The Radleys will then be released on Sky Cinema and in cinemas on October 18. > > > > ... > > > > "The Radleys are an ordinary family who hold a dark secret... they are abstaining vampires," reads the official synopsis for the film. > > > >"As if being a teenager wasn't bad enough, bloodthirsty instincts take over the teens of the family, revealing the terrifying truth and opening the door for an extended family member to re-enter and upend The Radleys' once perfect slice of suburbia." > > Trailer

cross-posted from: https://feddit.uk/post/16340845

> > The Laundry Files started with an element of situational comedy juxtaposed on a background of nightmarish horror: the government agency for protecting us from the likes of Cthulhu turns out to be just another secret civil service bureaucracy with forms, committee meetings, and an obsession with secrecy. Into which we inject a narrator who is a brash young hacker-nerd from the late 90s dot-com culture (who has been conscripted willy-nilly into something structured a lot like a very 1950s-ish Len Deighton spy agency, if updated in line with health and safety and HR legislation). “The inappropriate hero” is one of the classic humorous narrative forms because it gives us a sympathetic viewpoint from which to explore the lunacy of a situation, and there’s plenty of humor in any bureaucracy (as the early Dilbert cartoon strips illustrated, before it jumped the shark circa 1998). > > > >By the eighth book in the Laundry Files, Bob isn’t an outsider anymore; indeed, he’s at the lower end of senior management, representing the agency in public. But there’s still plenty of situational humor to be extracted by watching how a government deals with a whole new bureaucracy it was hitherto unaware it possessed. > > > >And then, of course, there’s the horror element. Like humor, horror is a tone you can apply to any other genre of fiction. (You can have a horror-spy crossover, or horror on top of SF, or horror on top of historical fiction, or . . .) And I find combining horror and humor particularly useful because the one contrasts with the other to great effect.