The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
Medical Horrors are concerned with the horrors of surgery and hospitals. One can also view specific variants of this under the themes Mad Surgeons and Mad Scientists.
The mad surgeon has been with us since the French Eyes Without a Face (1959) concerning a surgeon obsessed with abducting women to graft their faces onto his own daughter. This produced a number of copies. There have been assorted other films about surgeons of dubious sanity.
There is another whole body of films that concern themselves with haunted hospitals or hospitals where sinister activities or experiments are going on. Another popular theme concerns illegal Organ Harvesting schemes.
A 79 year-old David Cronenberg returns with one of his best films, a synthesis of his major themes in an extraordinary and perverse look at a future where surgery has become performance art. This site’s best film of 2022.
Brad Anderson, director of Session 9 and The Machinist, makes a great horror film with Michelle Monaghan as a mother trying to cope with her son’s sudden taste for blood
Lars von Trier returns to finish off his haunted hospital saga The Kingdom after a 25 years absence, despite the death of several principals, and again milks the same darkly hilarious vein
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
Sober realistic True Crime film based on the story of Charlie Cullen, a nurse in New Jersey that killed some 400 patients, injecting them with lethal doses of drugs
Jonathan Rhys Meyers wakes up in a hospital as strange hallucinatory and nightmarish things start to happen. The fact that this is a deathdream film becomes very obvious
A standout modern variant on the Frankenstein film where two women conspire to cross waaay over medical ethic lines to revive a child from the dead
Scottish director Lawrie Brewster, a promising newcomer on the genre horizon, has obtained the rights to revive the Amicus Films name and conducts a strong homage to the studio’s signature anthology film
Silent Hill was one of the best videogame film adaptations and created a genuinely uncanny atmosphere. That film’s director returns to the franchise here with more of the same but misses the mark