Anton Bitel

An initially intriguing thriller setup leads to something quite honestly disturbing in Adrián García Bogliano's Scherzo Diabolico, now available to watch via various Video On Demand platforms (and on DVD, too!). Opening with helicopter-style overhead shots, following a car as...

"Just try to think of it as a game. It'll help." This is the unnamed Gunner (Mekhi Phifer) speaking to his unit's new doctor Lauren Chase (Rachel Nichols), as he describes the best mental attitude to adopt while beating people from their moving...

A mother Sarah (Karina Logue) and her teenaged daughter Lucy (Amberley Gridley) are out driving. "It's not fair!" complains Lucy, upset about the boundaries being imposed on her adolescent conduct. This leads Sarah to cite the traditional saying amongst the...

A young woman runs laughing in a field - and in a blur. "Catch me!", she shouts, eluding both her addressee and even the camera's focus. Sunlit, soft and slo-mo, the opening images of Anthony Stabley's Everlasting may suggest something...

As FrightFest 2015 winds down today with a final burst of films, here's a final dispatch of movies seen and nightmares endured....

Four days in, and FrightFest has entered that bleary-eyed state of exhaustion where everything, on or off screen, seems hallucinatory, and conversations outside the cinema take on a rambling, incoherent trajectory. Everyone is starting to assume the muttered drawl and...

Film4 FrightFest has finally achieved the greatest accolade that can ever be conferred on a genre festival: it was picketed by politely determined Christian fundamentalists, concerned for the souls of all who entered the VUE, Leicester Square.. Here are some...

So here we go again. FrightFest 2015 will present 76 features (and sundry shorts and special events) spread over six screens in four and a half days. It's the very best - and some of the worst - that (mostly...

"I just want to be empty," Frank (Simon Meacock) tells his brother Tom (Ben Bishop). Wide-eyed, bearded Frank is at breaking point. Thanks to his freakish ability to become impregnated with the spirits of the deceased, he was born a...

In British bingo, if the number 88 comes up, the caller will shout, "Two fat ladies!", as a conventional code for the two figures' pictographic appearance. Similarly the title of April Mullen's 88 represents a conundrum in need of decoding:...

Straddling the grey area between found footage and faux documentary, The Atticus Institute purports to investigate the events leading to the sudden closure of an underfunded centre for parapsychological research in 1976, and the disappearance, maybe even demise, of its...