The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
Cults are separatist religious groups. The definition of a cult is a loose one but by general agreement it is a religious group that encourages its adherents to live outside the strictures of regular society, often in isolation and/or a communal existence. Cults will also require devotion to a charismatic leader and their teachings.
Cults have been with us for centuries but gained a fascination in the public eye during the 1960s and 70s with groups like Charles Manson’s Family, Jim Jones’ People’s Temple and others since such as the Branch Davidians and Heaven’s Gate who attained notoriety with murders and mass suicides. As a result, a group labelled a cult usually comes with connotations of controlling behaviour, relaxed sexual mores or abuse, slavishly murderous followers and belief in doomsday prophecies.
From the 1940s on, the screen has been filled with cults devoted to vampires, Ancient Egyptian practices, UFOs and aliens or to bringing about resurrections of occult figures. 1960s and 70s films are rife with depictions of Manson-styled murderous hippie cults, as well as cults devoted to Devil Worship set upon facilitating the birth of a Devil Child.
A different treatment came with The Wicker Man (1973) and its depictions of a small pocket of people devoted to Celtic folk religion in the present, which has been echoed by other films. Also popular have been a number of films in which the prophecies of doomsday cults turn out to be right after all.
This theme should be differentiated from Cult Movies about films that have devoted fan followings.
A ridiculous film where petty criminal Pete Davidson is given a job at a retirement home only to discover that sinister activities are occurring all around him. From the director of The Purge films
A Body Horror film that creates some undeniably ick effect where Dave Franco and Alison Brie play a couple who experience an infection that causes their bodies to start fusing into one whenever they touch
A homage to 1970s Backwoods Brutality films like The Texas Chain Saw Masscare and in particular The Hills Have Eyes, albeit filtered through the retro lens of a modern take like X
Yorgos Lanthimos has become a critically celebrated name in recent years. Here he has made an anthology of three surreal tales that come in his customary black deadpan
A film that takes place with no dialogue set in a post-apocalyptic world where people have forsaken speech as Samara Weaving is pursued by a cult
Ti West and Mia Goth round out their trilogy of films begun with X with a psycho film set in 1980s Hollywood
An original work that conjures a fantastic sense of ominous Lovecraftian cosmic horror as a man is haunted by a cult whose purpose is to wake a slumbering deity that is dreaming all of reality
A gonzo comedy about an alien invasion that takes place during a getaway at a remote cabin by assorted comically dysfunctional characters including a man who is accompanied by a talking handkerchief
DC Universe Animated film that is adapted from an Elseworlds story that offers up an alternate 1920s version of Batman who is fighting up against H.P. Lovecraft entities
This has a fascinating premise where the Catholic Church develops a resurrection process, before one priest starts to see a darker conspiracy beneath. Shot in the Screenlife process where the film screen becomes a computer screen
The fifth film of the Found Footage horror anthology series, including one episode that is among the best of the series so far
This conducts a seedily grim depiction of the world of the prostitutes working at a highway truck stop. In the midst of this, they try to deal with a killer eliminating their numbers
Compulsively watchable Ryan Murphy mini-series about a family whose life is torn apart by a sinister letter-writing campaign. A true story that gets far most bizarre than most fiction
Folk Horror about the discovery of a witch’s body in a bog, this is a slow burn film that falls together with great subtlety
Mike Flanagan horror mini-series adapted from Christopher Pike’s book, this is set around a group of patients in a hospice who form a group to tell each other horror stories
Low-budget film about a woman who inherits a British country estate to find someone has opened a portal to unleash entities. One of several low-budget films of late to appropriate Lovecraft’s name
A horror comedy starring the Foo Fighters where the band’s antics sit alongside some entertainingly outrageous gore
The popular V/H/S series, an anthology of Found Footage horror tales, is revived for a fourth entry
Director Rob Savage made a splash with the Zoom horror film Host. His second film here is an insanely crazed horror film that is shot from the point-of-view of a dashcam
An entry in the gonzo killer shark film fad from Mark Polonia, this has some undeniable amusement to its title mash-up as a team go in search of Noah’s Ark, which somehow has killer sharks involved
A reimagining of the long-running Wrong Turn series of Backwoods Brutality films, this does imaginative things with the set-up and emerges as the best of the series so far
This seems a variant on the plot about a cult pursuing a child for their purposes but expectations soon get twisted on their head in interesting ways
Blumhouse resurrects the Paranormal Activity series for another outing about an investigation into the secrets of an Amish cult
Perhaps not the worst Gonzo Killer Shark film ever made but it would sit among the worst half-dozen involving a shark-worshipping cult conducting sacrifices to summon a shark god in the cornfields
Another film that appropriates the Amityville name for an otherwise unrelated film concerning a man who inherits a house in the town, digs into the past and soon finds a devil worship cult all around him
An oddity among the animated Batman films. This seems less another Batman film – Bruce Wayne gets more screen time than Batman, for instance – than it does a homage to the 1970s martial arts film
A film based on the so-called Smiley Face Killings, a series of theorised true-life serial killings. With a script by Bret Easton Ellis of American Psycho fame
A UK TV mini-series that borrow much from The Wicker Man in a complex and fascinating story about the discovery of folk religion on a small island and becoming caught up in pending rituals
The Stephen King short story only runs to 16 pages. This is the eleventh film spinoff to date (which runs at about one film per 1.4 pages of story). Unlike the other sequels, this claims to be an origin story
A low-budget adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft’s The Shadow Over Innsmouth. That is if you can imagine Lovecraft’s story about fish people mating with humans relocated to a California AirBNB
Christopher Smith seemed one of the most promising genre directors of the 2000s with films like Triangle and Black Death. Here he returns with a venture into the English ghost story
Folk Horror is a term that has emerged as a distinct genre of its own in recent years; this is a B-budgeted attempt to join the bandwagon
Ari Aster made a big word of mouth splash with his debut film Hereditary, which had him acclaimed a major new name. This was his follow-up, a fascinating dive into Folk Horror territory in the depiction of a pagan cult
The second of the films based on Dolores Redondo’s police procedurals, this heads into an admirably dark and perverse place with plenty of jolt twists
An extraordinary Russian film that takes place in a uniquely designed dreamworld shared by people in comas. This has an imagination and conceptual grasp that rivals Inception
An entry from the revived Hammer Films directed by duo who made Goodnight Mommy. A slow burn of a film about cabin fever and fragmenting psychology often reminiscent of The Shining
Manos: The Hands of Fate is considered one of the worst films of all time. 42 years later some of those involved in the original decided to make a sequel that manages to be just as bad a film
Word of mouth hit that has in its fingertips the capacity to be a great horror film. Moments of intense spookiness and an awards-worthy performance from Toni Colette but Ari Aster has an unfocused script
Gareth Evans, the director of The Raid films, makes a film about the search for a missing sister among a cult. The film borrows from The Wicker Man, before a climactic dive into full-on gore and sadism
Nicolas Cage goes all Death Wish and slaughters a cult that murdered his wife. A regular revenge film is transformed by director Panos Cosmatos into something bizarrely primal
This BBC tv mini-series starts out seeming a mystery about the disappearance of a child as the investigating heroine makes the jolt realisation that she is the missing child, before the show edges over into occult conspiracy. Very nicely written and beautifully directed with a line-up of standout performances
Mary Harron directs a film about Charles Manson and his Family, taking the perspective of the Manson Girls. The best of several films about the Manson Killings. Former Doctor Who Matt Smith makes a hypnotically fascinating Manson
Quite a decent little low-budget film about a top secret government agency set up to despatch Lovecraftian Elder Gods.
The Teen Titans get their first solo film in the DC Universe Original Animated Movies. A reasonable adventure based on a classic comic title that works with a good story and characterisation, even if some of it has an adult flavour that makes you wonder who the audience is
Turkish director Con Evrenol made a splash with the horror film Baskin; this was his follow-up, an often head-scratching film about a housewife who is drawn into the mind-bending activities of a sinister cult
Nominally a sequel to Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead’s first film Resolution, this concerns a strange cult but expands outwards to involve a mind-boggling array of backwoods timeloops and reality blurrings
As directors, women are underrepresented – in terms of the content listed on this side, for example, probably less than 5% has been made by women. As a believer in equal opportunities for all, one can only cheer on XX where five women have gotten together to make a horror anthology
One of the directors of the Saw sequels surprises with this film where a family’s attempts to conduct a cult deprogramming as masked cultists surround the house prepared to do anything to get their recruit back
Stake Land, set in a beautifully wintry post-holocaust world where vampires had taken over, one of the best films from Glass Eye Pix. This is a sequel that reunites most of the same elements from the original but fails to ignite them as memorably as the first film did
This feels like a reworking of late 70s/early 80s sf films like Starman and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Much of the film is based around a series of amazing happenings but its crucial failure as science-fiction is the lack of explanations for why these are happening
This feels like mostly a series of horror tropes – ghost hunters with cameras in an abandoned building, backwoods occultists wanting the heroine’s baby – shuffled without originality
In his follow-up to Manborg, Steven Kostanski abandons the affectionate homages to 1980s video-released genre films he has specialised in so far. A homage to the works of H.P. Lovecraft, this should be seen for the utterly wild and outlandish makeup effects that Kostanski delivers
This has a great premise – a camera crew revisiting the site of a cult mass suicide stir up the ghosts of the cult members – and a director who I always maintained had much untapped potential. Alas, the finished result seems to slip by his hands
30 years in the making and the results are sensational. An action film so relentlessly foot-to-the-floor and full of kinetic wildness that it blows all its contemporaries away and sets the bar anew
A Devil Child variant with a couple finding that June, the foster child they take on, becomes possessed by an entity and develops incredible psychic powers whenever she is upset
Karyn Kusama returns to screens with a film about a sinister dinner party. This resides in usual horror effects than it takes place in brooding, unsaid things and a palpable sense of something terrible about to happen
Another in the spate of multi-director anthologies that have become popular in recent years – The ABCs of Death, V/H/S et al. This is set around the common locale of a desert highway where all five tales hover in an eerie twilight zone where the everyday world has stepped over into the uncanny
For supposedly the Paranormal Activity series final entry, this offer the novelty of the first Found Footage film in 3D – a gimmick that signals the series is out of fresh ideas. Moreover, the series’ look via watching security cameras has been de-emphasised in favour of another CGI driven ghost story
A ghost story that borrows quite a few touches from Assault on Precinct 13 in its tale of a haunted police station. Director Anthony DiBlasi spends his time on accumulating atmosphere with considerable effectiveness
This is a modestly effective effort that sits just on the dividing line between interesting and cliched – the undeniably captivating premise involves an Amish-like cult dealing with a series of prophecies about devil children and killings of their number
Someone had the bright idea to make a film centred around the creepy doll that appears in the wraparound scenes of The Conjuring. But without James Wan as director, everything disappears into formulaic scares
Fan parody/homage of H.P. Lovecraft that comes waist-deep in references and jokes. The film is an amateur effort made with a painful cheapness in some areas; nevertheless it is clear that the team are really into making it and their enthusiasm carries the film
Another offering from the revived Hammer Films. Like a few films of recent, this claims to be based on a true story – a parapsychological experiment conducted in the 1970s – but throws almost every detail out the window to substitute a well-worn bag of horror tricks
Less another sequel than a spinoff of the Paranormal Activity series, this takes place with Latino characters and in a whole different culture and socio-economic strata. While this gives the series a face change, everything else it feels like the shuffling of a well-worn deck of plot cards
Sequel to the sleeper 2010 Found Footage hit. Alas, this is a sequel that understands almost nothing about what made the first film so original and is just a possession film that comes utterly by the numbers
Ti West, a rising name in horror in the last few years, makes a film about the activities of a sinister cult. Soon into the film, you realise that he is actually conducting a modern Found Footage retelling of the infamous Jonestown mass suicide of the 1970s
Sequel to the modest success of V/H/S, an anthology of short Found Footage horror films featuring a different line-up of genre directors. The episodes are competent at best, none standout and mostly forgettable
At first glance, Stephen Sommers and Dean R. Koontz seem strange bedfellows, but oddly enough it works – Koontz gives Sommers more story than he is used to working with and surprisingly it is the likeable characters and mind-boggling quirks of plot at the forefront rather than Sommers’ usual CGI bombast
New Zealand comedy in which a teenage daughter discovers that her father Temuera Morrison is a modern-day Maori cannibal cultist. Everything is given a very broad playing
The Paranormal Activity series has had a better run than most horror franchises up until now but the cracks are starting to show through here. This feels like it is straining to find some new way to do the familiar moves but fails to provide anything unexpected or original
Dull and unimaginative Silent Hill sequel that only revisits what went before. The first film had an uncanny otherworldly atmosphere but the sequel reduces everything to no more than pop-up Clive Barker
Paul Thomas Anderson’s loose biopic of Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard is a film composed of great acting and great individual scenes more so than it ever coheses as a story or delves in to interrogate its characters. Far too elusive as a story to quite be the masterpiece it is readily being hailed as
An early film from Ron Bonk misleadingly sold with connection to the notorious Italian cannibal film, concerning the tenants of an apartment building under siege by a mysterious cult
Essentially a supernatural version of a 1970s car chase movie with Nicolas Cage as a motorist who has escaped from Hell to settle a score. This makes a play for the trashy and absurd and comes out all the more entertaining for it
Kevin Smith discovers a newfound maturity in this work about a religious cult. Smith subdues his adolescent humour in a series of darkly laced dramatic twists, while the show is capped by some great performances
Fascinating film about a cult centred around a woman who claims to come from the future. Featuring an ethereal performance from a then unknown Brit Marling, the film remains ambiguous about her claims. Less a script than a series of often emotionally raw scenes that have been improvised between the actors
This feels like Children of the Corn remade by Terrence Malick. The film does nicely with the wry, quietly observed naturalism of its Coming of Age story, less so when it moves into horror territory
Strong and highly original film that takes place in a post-apocalyptic world overrun by vampires. This has more the feel of a zombie film or an existential Western but does some highly original things with its ideas
This starts out was as a film about multiple personality disorder with several scenes that catch your attention before it drifts into a muddle of confused supernatural themes
Gregg Araki film that centres around sexually conflicted university student Thomas Dekker and his various liaisons amid witches, a doomsday weapon, cults and premonitions
Ridiculous film that seems to want to say something about modern technological interconnectivity but has simply grafted it onto a slasher formula. while being bsurdly ill-informed about its subject
A film about the Manson Family killings told through the eyes of one of Manson Girls Leslie Van Houten. This becomes a savage and biting indictment of 1960s social morality
This remake of the Stephen King short story (this time with a script from King himself) is a much better film than the earlier 1984 version or any of its numerous sequels
A Found Footage film that has fun uniting wacky conspiracy theories into a grand unified thesis. The swim of ideas is head-spinning
A fitfully amusing H.P. Lovecraft fanboy comedy. Lovecraft, a noted conservative, would likely have deplored the idea of the nerd comedy but this gets the flavour of Lovecraft’s works down better than most
A Found Footage film about a tv crew investigating Lovecraftian cultists who are trying to raise an elder god. This makes an okay stab but is distinctly hampered by a low budget
Animated Justice League film, which adapts a comic-book storyline that reconceived the various DC superheroes as they were back in the era of their original creation
One of the most conceptually confusing films I have seen in some time – it starts out seeming like a film about people hunting a near-mythical giant pig before abruptly veering off into Backwoods Brutality territory and then out of the blue introducing a sinister cult to the mix
Another Uwe Boll videogame adaptation, a satire where Zack Ward sets out on a shooting spree. Boll sets out to offend as many people as possible but somehow forgets to make any of it funny
Strong and intelligent Spanish film that readily homages Philip K. Dick in its mind-expanding story of a science-fiction fan being contacting aliens
Could it be too hard to go wrong in making a film about a doomsday cult hunting people through a subway tunnel? Apparently it is and after a promising beginning, the film churns the cliches with little tension
From The Blair Witch Project co-director Daniel Myrick, a film about two paramedics abducted into a crazed UFO cult who believe their delivery is coming
Reasonable budgeted film about a series of Biblical plagues being visited upon a rural Louisiana town. An interesting set up that flounders amid a confused script
A blatant copy of Hostel wherein a trio of students cross the Mexican border and fall prey to a Santeria cult. Despite its derivativeness in the plot department, this emerges as a brutal and fairly well made film
A group of friends travel to Ireland and go on a tour searching for magic mushrooms. In between assorted drug hallucinations, someone or thing begins slaughtering the group
One of the best of all filmed videogame adaptations. Christophe Gans creates a creepy and unworldly atmosphere, along with a series of genuinely outlandish creature effects
A satiric Claymation animated version of the Manson murders. The film quickly heads for some astonishing bad taste areas, before finding itself in some biting black humour and songs
Troma film about a group of trampers attacked by a Yeti only for one of the group to discover gay love with the Yeti
The big-budget film version of The Hitch Hiker’s Guide phenomenon is a disaster that fumbles Douglas Adams’s absurdist wit and blows everything up with big-budget effects and a pitch to American audiences
Seventh and worst of the Hellraiser films. Clive Barker had departed three films ago and the copyright taken by a company that specialises in cheap sequels. This blurs reality and illusion so much it makes no sense