The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
A curse is an invocation that calls upon a supernatural power to inflict ill will against a person or persons. The curse is usually invoked by speaking words of power such as a ritual or invocation.
In the horror genre, curses are often placed on individuals, their families, their descendants, even entire towns. These can often occur on a particular occasion such as a birthday or an anniversary of some crime in the past. This may often be because of the persecution of a wronged innocent such as a Witch who was burned at the stake. Voodoo also offers a variety of curses.
In fantasy, curses are enacted by wizards and witches. Curses can often be responsible for afflicting a person with bodily transformation of some type (notedly The Beast in various versions of Beauty and the Beast). It can also afflict people with Immortality, leaving them unaging as punishment or until they seek restitution for their crimes.
Places can also be regarded as cursed where those that intrude bring death and retribution on themselves. This has even extended into real-life such as the tabloid belief that those who opened Tutankhamun’s tomb were cursed for doing so. See also Cursed Objects for artefacts that exude evil influence.
A new and extremely good adaptation of the Sherlock Holmes story featuring Richard Roxburgh as Holmes. This offers some radical shakeups of the story and characters
This is the English-language version of the Japanese horror Ring and actually a much better and far spookier film, where the new script gives the story more depth
An incredibly good adaptation of the Sherlock Holmes story. Thought lost for many years, this was made at the height of German Expressionism and has a vividness that other adaptations lack
An Arabian Nights adventure that offers up one of the purest blends of fantasy and romance of its era. Filled with stunning directorial set-pieces and magnificent sets and all shot in colour.
This Hayao Miyazaki film about a girl who becomes assistant to a mysterious magician is not quite in the same league as Princess Mononoke or Spirited Away but has the sublime beauty, eccentric characters and tender charms that all his work does
Fascinating forgotten film with Richard Boone as a cemetery keeper who finds he can kill by placing pins on a map of the cemetery. This feels like a forgotten Twilight Zone episode and develops some quite creepy effect.
Charming and delightful film starring Veronica Lake as a witch burned at the stake who returns to life in the present to make life miserable for her judge’s descendant Frederic March
Yorgos Lanthimos trains his a bizarrely deadpan black humour to make a horror film where surgeon Colin Farrell finds a strange malady has afflicted his family unless he kills one of them in sacrifice
A beautifully made Richard Donner mediaeval fantasy with two lovers suffering a curse that transforms them into animals only able to touch in person for a second at dusk and dawn
The second of the Japanese Death Note films, released almost back-to-back with the first. This is an even better film than its predecessor, delighting in the twists and turns in the games as Light and his nemesis L outwit each other
The original mummy film starring Boris Karloff. Unlike the sequels where the mummy became a slow, shuffling creature, this is a subtle classic with haunted mood.
Beautifully made anime from Makoto Shinkai about a young girl and a three-legged chair on a quest to close a series of portals across Japan and prevent unimaginable chaos emerging
Classic occult film from former Val Lewton associate Jacques Tourneur that sits in a wonderfully ambiguous place where we cannot be certain whether the supernatural is real or imagined
Hammer Films’ one and only Sherlock Holmes adaptation. It is beautiful to see the opulence of early Hammer productions brought to bear giving the story unusually effective life
Absolutely fascinating Irish-Scottish film about people hunting each other with arcane sorceries on a rundown Edinburgh council estate … Compulsively fascinating in its often enigmatic approach, while depicting magic on screen in a way unlike anything we have seen before
Hayao Miyazaki in a more whimsical comedic mood with this story of the adventures of a talking pig aviator. Even when in a lighter vein, Miyazaki cannot help but fill the film with images of charm and considerable beauty
An amazing breakout hit from Russia, a film that is busy to the point of overcrowding with ideas and its’ director’s visual excess but delivers the goods in ways that make your jaw drop
Adaptation of the fairytale that takes place in an exquisitely dreamy sumptuousness – a stunningly designed, costumed and photographed world that has a genuine magic. However, the motion-capture animated Beast looks far too much like a CGI effect
One of the finest of all Disney animated films, an adaptation of the fairytale made with the full artistic resources that studio could bring to bear
The start of the 90s renaissance of Disney animation, a beautifully made adaptation of the fairytale that hearkens back to the Disney Golden Age. The only animated film nominated for an Academy Award Best Picture
The second of the Japanese Ring/Ringu films where director Hideo Nakata improves over the original with a series of eerie scares if a frequently incomprehensible mishmash of story ideas
A small masterpiece of 1960s Italian Gothic cinema. Exquisitely moody black-and-white photography with Barbara Steele as the ideal of a Gothic dominatrix twisting men around her finger and setting a town against itself
Uniquely original Japanese horror film adapted from a manga concerning a book that kills anyone whose name is written in it. This has spawned several sequels and an American remake. The show is stolen by the supremely weird Kenichi Matsuyama
The first in a series of Sherlock Holmes films starring Basil Rathbone, who became the definitive Holmes for many years, and a reasonable adaptation of the Arthur Conan Doyle novel
Exquisitely shot Technicolor fantasy in which Ava Gardner is romanced by James Mason as the Flying Dutchman, cursed to eternally sail the seas
Smile was a sleeper hit about a viral curse and created a reasonable spooky atmosphere. The surprise is that this sequel manages to still deliver the goods too
Horror film about a viral curse that bends the victim’s sense of reality and illusion, this settles in with some undeniably creepy effect
Frothy work of Magical Realism with Penelope Cruz as a woman whose cooking weaves a magical spell
The remake of Cat People. In the hands of Paul Schrader, all the ambiguity is made overt and the film becomes one of Schrader’s allegories for tormented sexuality. On its own terms, this is an often smoulderingly sensual work
Given lavish period settings and featuring a sterling cast line-up of British talent from the day, this is probably the most faithful film adaptation of the Conan Doyle story
I’ve never been a huge fan of the Harry Potter series but the final chapter rounds out the boy wizard saga in rousing style, mounting an epic-sized battle and finding characters depths that hold some of the best writing of the series
Sweet and tender anime about a young girl who has a curse placed on her that causes her to lose her voice and how this actually allows everyone around her to voice things they don’t say.
Beautifully filmed Victorian-set fantasy in which orphan Dakota Blue Richards moves to her uncle’s estate and discovers the magical secrets it holds
This is nominally a Western – one of the harsh and realistic ones made at the end of the 1970s – and quite a good one too. It comes with a real surprise ending that takes it over into fantasy
Nicely animated film from Richard Rich that tells the story of Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake in which a princess is turned into a swan by an evil sorcerer
A multi-director horror anthology where all the directors are Latin American
Paco Plaza, co-director of the [Rec] films, shows James Wan how to do a nun horror film properly. This is a prequel to Plaza’s earlier Veronica, telling an origin story for Sister Death
Nobody much liked Maleficent but did make a reasonable amount of money, hence a sequel. The surprise is that in the hands of Norwegian director Joachim Rønning, it is far better than one expected
The greatly underrated Sean Ellis returns with a beautifully understated film about the hunt for a possible werewolf creature loose in rural 19th Century France. Everything happens in a state of careful ambiguity
Harsh and brutal work written by Bret Easton Ellis of American Psycho fame wherein a group of jocks harass and tear apart the life of Bella Heathcote after she accidentally blinds the leader’s eye in the process of rejecting his advances
John Carpenter film that was marketed as a Raiders of the Lost Ark copy but is more Carpenter trying to emulate Hong Kong’s Wu Xia cinema, which was largely unknown in the West at the time. All with highly enjoyable conic results.
Big serious film about Santeria religion that readily delves into the voodoo side of it as detective Martin Sheen and his family are targeted by cultists
This live-action remake of the Disney animated film is mounted with a lavishness. On the other hand, the romance at the centre never fully warms up, while the human characters have the show stolen from under by the cutlery and furnishings
David Slade seemed a promising directorial name several years ago with works like the charged Hard Candy, before making Twilight films and being lost in tv. Here he returns with a film set around a small town’s deadly Halloween rituals
A much better than usual film from Charles Band, an erotic fairytale in which Sherilyn Fenn becomes involved with a circusmaster and his twin brother who turns into a werewolf
Spooky Russian film about a haunted plane flight, this recalls something of The Twilight Zone’s famous Nightmare at 20,000 Feet episode
Kaidan eiga (Japanese ghost story) that was a huge hit, spawning several sequels and an English-language remake, plus a horde of imitators. For all its reputation, the film is often crude, nevertheless does evince an eerie atmosphere
May the Devil Take YouThe Evil Dead. Here Timo Tjajjanto makes a sequel and goes absolutely demented
This takes its title literally – it is made by a woman director and there are no men on screen. The result is somewhere between The Descent and The Blair Witch Project with an undeniably surprise twist ending
The most successful Taiwanese horror film of all time, a Found Footage film about paranormal investigators who witness a ritual and are afterwards haunted by it
A Spanish horror film that develops some reasonable effect in its story about a writer who moves to a small town only to find the locals are keeping sinister secrets
Director Freddie Francis had had great success making several of the Amicus horror anthologies then went independent to made another Amicus-styled anthology here with mixed results
Hallmark mini-series set in a world 200 years after the classic fairytales have occurred, this wittily deflates or contrasts classic story elements with the present-day
Enjoyably tongue-in-cheek pirate swashbuckler based on the Disney theme park that proved an enormous hit and spun off a series of sequels, as well as giving Johnny Depp one of his iconic roles
One of the better films from B-budget dircetor Bert I. Gordon, a fantasy adventure where Gordon produces some decent effects
Bryan Bertino has become a Must Watch director ever since The Strangers. Here he makes a film where Dakota Fanning receives a cursed box and will die unless she places several requested items inside
The interesting idea of the fairytale Beauty and the Beast retold in a modern high school setting. Despite itself, the film manages to wring a reasonable sincerity out of the premise
Modest effort in which Scout Taylor-Compton becomes possessed by an evil spirit while in Thailand. Nothing groundbreaking but this creates reasonable atmosphere
A light fantasy comedy with Lucas Donat as the inheritor of a Scottish castle that is haunted by a ghost and the problems faced when the castle is sold to be shipped to America
The Asylum takes on Homer. One is tempted to say Homer loses to The Asylum but this freely rearranges the basics and The Asylum deliver a solid effort that rises above the mediocrity they usually aim for
Film based on an urban legend film about a boogeyman that kills everybody that speaks its name. Director Stacy Title creates one or two haunting and unusual scenes but in every other aspect this emerges as exceedingly generic
This feels like the Final Destination franchise updated for the mobile user generation concerning a sinister app that predicts how long the user has to live
Another version of the popular figure from Japanese urban legend, which has appeared in a number of films. This is an anthology where four Japanese directors have come to L.A. to shoot a series of strictly average short horror tales, not all of which feature the Slit Mouth Woman
In the early 2010s, we had a series of fairytales rewritten as dark adult fantasies; The Asylum served up their own cheap copies – this was their version of Maleficent. Directed by actor Casper Van Dien, this not uninterestingly plays out as a fantasy adventure that follows the prince’s attempts to enter the castle
The third of the Conjuring films, this lacks the presence of James Wan in the director’s seat while peddling an even more highly dubious Based on a True story claim regarding a demonic possession
Spanish-made film that feels like a mash-up of Annabelle and The Nun about the communion doll belonging to a girl who went missing that appears and curse everyone it touches
This has the feel of a fairytale where Christina Ricci plays a girl who suffers from a hereditary curse that has left her with a pig-like snout
Catherine Breillat, a director usually known for tackling issues of female sexuality, adapts the classic fairytale in a muddled effort that singularly fails to fly either as fairytale or deconstruction
Film about a sinister small town where the population must always be kept at the title figure. An interestingly strange scenario suffers from far too laidback direction
Eddie Murphy – one of the funniest talents of the 1980s – has been largely absent for much of the 2010s. He returns here with a Christmas comedy in which he is the recipient of a curse given to him by an evil Santa elf
Third in the series of slasher homage films where Adam Green steps back from the director’s chair. This ups the gore content and number of genre cameos, otherwise is fairly much the same as before
Obscure 1970s horror that generates a certain creepy effect with four girls gathered at a big old house for sinister purpose. before going sidewise during the second half amid a profusion of competing tropes
Part of the 80s/90s fad for makeup effects driven popcorn horror – in this case, actually directed by an effects artist. The film moves slow as molasses but the giant zombie poodle and zombie Phyllis Diller do compensate
Rapper Snoog Dogg fails badly at branding himself as a horror anthology host, while the stories prove nothing to write home about either
One of the entries from the Italian Gothic cycle featuring a big decaying castle, lurking disfigured figures, sinister hypnotists and moodily atmospheric black-and-white photography
Essentially Fatal Attraction with voodoo in which Mark Hamill engages in an affair with Apollonia and breaks it off only to find a voodoo curse has been placed on him
This is what might result if Greenpeace were allowed to take over the BBC arts division. Nicely made but not necessarily a great period drama about a whale curse
The two most popular Japanese horror franchises come together to fight it out. Both series work on the provision of intensely uncanny effect but brought together the result is diluted at best
Largely forgotten version of the fairytale that is too rudimentary and pedestrian to find much flight of fantasy compared to other classic versions
Friday the 13th so changed the horror genre that within two years it produced two four parodies of its title. From Roger Corman, this is more of an occasionally amusing parody of classic monster movies than the slasher film
Madcap Hong Kong comedy variant on Firestarter where Chingmy Yau has a curse that she starts fires when aroused
Medieavel fantasy action film with Nicolas Cage and Ron Perlman assigned to escort a witch who may be able to deliver the land from the Black Plague. The wider moral issues of the film are buried under action and CGI
The perpetually terrible Mick Garris is allowed loose on another Stephen King book where he promptly reduces a subtle, ambiguous ghost story to a series of lunging pop-up scares without any concept of atmosphere or nuance
One of the cheap fairytale adaptations made by Cannon Films in the 1980s. A dreary impoverished run through by the numbers with Morgan Fairchild as the Wicked Stepmother and Tahnee Welch in the title role
With the success of the Edgar Allan Poe adaptations starring Vincent Price, this was a copycat attempt that cast Price in a trio of tales adapted from another writer of American horror stories, Nathaniel Hawthorne
Hatchet was a homage to the 1980s slasher film that had a mild amusement. In the sequels, Adam Green upped the number of genre cameos and in-jokes, while pushing the gore effects to an extreme
Long-winded French film largely about criticising the country’s problematic immigration and asylum seeking system. This also has a B plot about a series of cursed documents
German animated film about the adventures of Snow White’s Seven Dwarves. Lightweight and trivial, this feels like it has come along ten years too late to the fad for fairytale parodies and mash-ups we had in the mid-2000s with films like Shrek and Hoodwinked!
Adaptation of one of Stephen King’s Richard Bachman novels about an obese lawyer afflicted with a thinning curse. There are some great effects but the film’s moral messages come off as wrong
The Ju-on/The Grudge series has spawned thirteen films to date. This was the second sequel to the English-language remake but by this point everything disappears into formulaic scares
A low-budget ingenue effort by three friends about a tenant who discovers that the third floor of his apartment building contains the ghosts of dead asylum inmates
A blatant attempt to copy Ray Harryhausen’s The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, night down to employing the same lead actors and director, but this fails through shoddy stop-motion animated effects
Another effort from the Golden Age of kaidan eiga (Japanese ghost story films) during the 1950s-60s. While this assembles the essentials of the genre, it is only delivered in terms of a series of strident and unsubtle pop-up effects
From the acclaimed Simon Rumley comes this true crime drama about the execution of an innocent man and the supposed curse he placed on all who condemned him
Someone decided to make a horror film about the practice of shrinking heads conducted by some South American Indian tribes. Despite starting well, this is mostly dull and pedestrian
An Abbott and Costello comedy. Not one of their monster bashes but a variant on the light comedy that had been popular in the last decade with Lou as an 18th Century ghost haunting Bud Abbott in the present. Can’t say I am a big fan of their humour, most of the slapstick that seems dated today
This seems to want to do for the lesbian vampire film what Shaun of the Dead did for the zombie film. Alas, the film makes its appeal fairly and squarely into the crude, sexism of British lad culture
In this homage to the 1970s occult film, Rob Zombie tones back the posturing shock effect of his earlier films and creates atmosphere. Eventually though, Zombie creates a film that feels coiled to unleash something bad but falters
Sam Raimi chose to follow up his hugely successful Spider-Man trilogy with this incredibly silly film about Gypsy curses. Raimi piles on ridiculous shock effects that become so over-the-top that the film ends up somewhere in orbit
Another in the early 2010s fad for fairytales rewritten as dark adult fantasy films – in this case, a version of Disney’s Sleeping Beauty told from the viewpoint of the witch