In the middle of the 1970s British mining unions held a protracted strike against the government and as coal stocks dwindled extended scheduled blackouts turned back the clock on major cities returning the night to the darkness. It is against this historical setting that writer/director Corinna Faith has crafted a slow-burn ghost story with The Power.

Trainee nurse Val (Rose Williams), a survivor of religious orphanages, on her first day at the East London Royal Hospital rapidly finds herself on the bad side of her supervisor and is assigned in addition to her day shift to work the hospital overnight while most of the facility has been left empty during the night’s black-out. Val’s night, already a trail for her due to her trauma induced fear of the dark, is made worse when rumors and insinuations from her past have already poised the minds of some of her fellow nurses. With the hospital, save for two small wards, empty and dark Rose is confronted by her own terrible past and a supernatural force staking the hospital’s shadowy halls.

The Power is a slow burns ghost story, and the film is excellent in every aspect. Faith’s script is solids wasting little time and relaying on suggestion and what is unsaid more than what is obvious. Her direction makes full use of a location where there is mostly nothing and what terrifies lies just beyond the lantern’s pitiful circle of illumination. Cinematographer Laura Bellingham lights this movie perfectly. Low light scenes are difficult to manage, too dark and the audience can’t immerse themselves in the unfolding story, too well-lit and its becomes difficult if not impossible to empathize with a character who should see clearly everything around them. Bellingham strikes the perfect balance, never forgetting that there is audience that needs to see the action and yet always filling the screen with deep dark and threatening shadows.

It is said that actors have either ‘open faces’ that allows the interior emotion to flow out to the audience or ‘closed faces’ where vocal talents and spoken words are required to convey the character’s emotional state. Rose Williams has an open face. Val often speaks little, shy, reserved, and damaged by trauma it is her nature to not be seen to not be noticed and Williams’ performance never fails to include the audience. With subtle expression she fully conveys her character’s inner demons, fears, and eventually her strength.

The Power is an excellent and unsettling study of trauma and how that pain echoes long past the events. It is available for rent on VOD and streaming currently as a Shudder Exclusive.

Edgar Wright, director of such films as Shaun of the Dead, andScott Pilgrim vs the World, last week released his psychological/supernatural horror film Last Night in Soho.

Ellie (Thomasin McKenzie) is a young woman from the countryside of England coming to London for University to study at an art institute chasing her dreams of becoming a fashion designer. Already obsessed with the swinging sixties and sensitive enough to be aware of her mother’s ghost in mirrors, Ellie is primed for when a living in her new and unfamiliar settings to psychically link with the spirit of Sandie (Anya Taylor-Joy) an outgoing, confident aspiring singer of sixties London. Seemingly a blessing as Ellie draws confidence and inspiration from Sandie things turn dark and terrifying as tragedy of the singer’s life unravels and Ellie learns that the sixties are not as distant as she thought them to be.

Last Night in Soho made for a perfect capper to the spooky season and seeing it on Halloween itself only made the experience that much richer. The film displays Wright’s well-known talent for integrating song with his themes and actions. Dexterous camera work used during Ellie’s visions and reliving of the past create engaging sequences in which the two women, separated by six decades, share the screen and interact without ever spoiling the willing suspension of disbelief. Wright deftly avoids cinematic tropes that would have bordered on titillation while exploring and revealing the misogyny at the heart of Sandie’s tragedy. He and co-writer Krysty Wilson-Cairns also sidestep the traps of presenting men in totality as dangerous predators with Ellie’s dependable friend John (Michael Ajao). Last Night in Soho also gives us the final screen performance of same Diana Rigg, a favorite among younger fans for her work as the queen of thorns in HBO’s Game of Thrones but known to us older fans for decades of memorable performances.

While the movie has a few well executed ‘jump scares’ this film depends more on mood, suspense, and growing dread than sharp musical queues and graphic kills to achieve its effect. If movies such as The Haunting or The Witch are to your liking, then Last Night in Soho may very well be for you.

Lamb — like the meat — is not to everyone’s taste. The A24 Icelandic folk horror is methodically paced taking its time to reveals its characters, its strange, unearthly conceit, and ultimately its grief-stricken heart.

Maria (Noomi Rapace) and Ingvar (Hilmir Snaer Guonason) struggling under a stifling and unspoken grief are a married couple on a potato and sheep ranch in the isolated and austere Icelandic landscape. In the spring a strange and unnatural lamb’s birth upsets their repetitive life as the couple bonds and adopts the lamb as though it were their own child. Ingvar’s brother and failed musician Petur (Bjorn Hlynur Haraldsson) arrival at the ranch coinciding with Maria’s disposing of the lamb’s sheep birth mother further complicates their lives until in the film’s final scenes mysteries and tragedies are revealed.

Lamb’s pace in deliberate and steady making other slow-burn horror films, such as Robert Eggers The Witch, seem frenetic and hurried in comparison. Director Valdimar Johannsson and Cinematographer Eli Arenson build Lamb out of long take that linger on the characters, their silent reactions, unspoken pain, and the majestic, foreboding, mist-shrouded mysterious mountains thar encircle the ranch, isolating it from the world and its rationality. The landscape presenting Iceland in stark, unforgiving, and yet beautiful images rivals the grandeur John Ford’s work in Monument Valley.

Rapace, who also executively produced the film, plays Maria with an ever-present sense of loss and the choice to present the acclaimed with little make-up displaying her natural freckled face further reinforces the stark cold reality of the film as it embraces a folklore like fantasy at its heart.

Lamb is not a film for someone seeking high adrenaline bloody ‘kills,’ but rather for those inclined for a sedate but steadily a growing sense of dread.

Lamb is currently playing in select theaters.

My SF/Noir Vulcan’s Forge is available from Amazon and all booksellers. The novel is dark, cynical, and packed with movie references,

Poe has for a long time been a source for Hollywood to mine in search of new horror properties. 1935 the year the production code went into full effect Universal released The Raven very loosely adapted from Poe’s poem and starring the two biggest stars at the time in horror, Lugosi, and Karloff.

Lugosi plays Dr Vollin a brilliant but vain and arrogant surgeon. After saving the life of a daughter of a local judge Vollin becomes infatuated with the young woman and then mad when his ‘affections’ are not returned. In a plot contrivance of convenience Edmond Bateman, played by Karloff, an escaped convict under a death sentence attempts to force Vollin to perform plastic surgery so that he might escape the law. Vollin turns the tables on Bateman and intends to use him as part of his revenge on all who have denied him his true happiness.

The Raven (1935) is not very good but with a runtime of just one minute over an hour it doesn’t take up much if your life either. Karloff delivers a surprisingly nuanced performance that has echoes of his portrayal of the creature in 31’s Frankenstein. Lugosi, in the calmer more deliberate moments of his character is quite good however when the final act rolls around and he goes big his performance turns comical and appears even more so in contrast to Karloff’s in the same scenes where his understated delivery steals the moment. The movie may be unique for its second act interpretive dance of Edgar Allen Poe’s The Raven, but that itself is not enough to save this picture.

The Raven is currently stream in on The Criterion Channel as part of their Universal Monsters Collection.

My SF/Noir Vulcan’s Forge is available from Amazon and all booksellers. The novel is dark, cynical, and packed with movie references,

I kicked off Spooky Season 2021 watching 1974’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, a foundational film in the slasher genre and one that I had never seen before. (I must confess of the various sub-genre of horror slashers are among the least like by me.) Made for the equivalent of 700,0000 dollars today, TTCM is a very low budget exploitive movie that had surprisingly little gore or explicitly depicted violence/ It is also in my eye quite dull, uninteresting, and generally unworthy of viewing.

Five young adults, couples Sally and Jerry, Pam and Kirk, along with Sally’s brother Franklin, a wheelchair user, drive is rural part of Texas after reports of graverobbing to ensure that Sally and Franklin’s grandfather’s grave is not among the violated. afterwards they visit the family homestead, long abandoned, and after becoming separated one by one fall victim to a local family of cannibals one of, Leatherface, murders and dismembers the victims with a chainsaw.

Directed, produced, and co-written by Tobe Hoppe, TTCM makes the most of its limited budget, shooting locations, and cast and could have been a far more interesting movie. Its essential flaw is that the five central characters lack any real sense of character. Of these young people in peril the only defining characteristic I can recall from last night’s viewing is that Pam believes in astrology. Beyond that I can’t tell you anything about each of them as a person, other than the cinematic cliches of being quite dim about entering strange buildings uninvited and refusing to go to authorities when people go missing in the wilds at night. This lack of character or personality ultimately means a lack of caring as people stumble blindly into their doom. Rather than a sense of tragedy from unforeseeable events I experienced only boredom and irritation at their actions and dialog. Luckily the movie runs a brief but seemingly interminable 83 minutes.

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is currently streaming on Shudder as one of their ‘essentials.’

My SF/Noir Vulcan’s Forge is available from Amazon and all booksellers. The novel is dark, cynical, and packed with movie references,