Niche Film Writings

Bill Hader as Richie and James Ransone as Eddie in It Chapter Two.  Courtesy of New Line Cinema. This realisation may come half a year late, but after months of thought an d deliberation, I have admitted something to myself: It Chapter Two is homophobic. That is to say, It Chapter Two has a huge problem with how it treats its (implied) gay characters. For the sake of this article, I am taking as fact that Richie and Eddie are both gay, though this is not explicitly confirmed in the film, and I want to discuss how the inclusion of gay characters actually makes the film more homophobic. Stick with me on this. Many gays (myself included) initially heralded It Chapter Two as a victory in terms of representation in horror; screenwriter Gary Dauberman took the previously subtextual relationship between leads Eddie and Richie, and made it far more apparent. The dynamic between Eddie and Richie was easily the most enjoyable part of It Chapter Two , an otherwise mediocre sequel to the 20...

Park So-dam and Choi Woo-shik in Parasite. Courtesy of CJ Entertainment. At the 92nd Academy Awards on the 9th of February, Bong Joon-ho’s socio-political thriller Parasite made history by becoming the first foreign language film to be awarded the Best Picture Oscar. Bong was the biggest winner of the night, receiving Best Original Screenplay, Best International Feature Film, and Best Director on top of the prestigious Best Picture, bringing international cinema to the forefront and introducing a new audience to the many phenomenal foreign films in the world today.  Every year, a select few international films break through the language barrier and reach a worldwide audience; in 2018 we had Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma , and the year before that, Sebastian Lelio’s A Fantastic Woman ( Una Mujer Fantástica ) claimed the best foreign film Oscar. These films never become major box office hits; their success always comes with the asterisk of being in another language, and they are cons...

The Descent (2005), image courtesy of Lionsgate and Annihilation (2018), image courtesy of Skydance media. Neil Marshall’s The Descen t and Alex Garland’s Annihilation are similar in concept and plot, though they take different approaches when exploring the theme of grief and trauma. Both films follow a group of women exploring potentially dangerous unmapped terrain; in The Descen t, we focus on thrill-seeking cave divers who want to claim a new cave system as their own, but who soon discover that they are not alone in the darkness, while Annihilation revolves around five scientists venturing into the mysterious “Shimmer”, an unexplained, seemingly radioactive area of swampland causing disturbances in the local nature, from which no previous research team has returned. The unknown environments in both films clearly represent the process of undergoing a severe trauma or loss; indeed, both protagonists have suffered a significant bereavement prior to the film’s main action. H...

In 2015, Joaquin Phoenix was removed from the cast of M Night Shyamalan’s psychodrama-slash-horror, Split . Oh no , we all thought. This is a dreadful shame. When will Joaquin get a chance to be in a gritty comic book movie that demonises mental illness to the point of being both tasteless and offensive? But alas, we shouldn’t have worried! Four years later and Mr Phoenix granted our wishes, coming to the big screen as the “ferocious”, “feral” “bold, devastating and utterly beautiful” Joker . Hooray! An icon for our modern age! The Scorsese-backed, De Niro-esque Tyler Durden-knock off that we’ve all been asking for. I can’t wait to see with what sensitivity Todd Phillips treats the delicate topics of mental illness, marginalisation and isolation under capitalism, I thought . Surely in today’s environment of political unrest, social instability and stratification, he will create some truly meaningful commentary on how society should not turn its back on the minorities and vuln...

Courtesy of MGM. In horror films, the transition from girl to woman and girl to demon is one and the same: the arrival of a girl’s first menstruation. In a certain light this association makes sense; puberty is about changing from one entity to another and entering the new realm of adulthood, and this is a scary, turbulent time for everyone. Using this experience in horror imagery as an outlet for the universal confusion and anger it causes is understandable, especially considering horror’s large teenage audience. Emotions are volatile and extreme, the body mutates into something almost unrecognisable; puberty is a fruitful terrain for a variety of horror narratives, but why do most horror films that focus on puberty tell the same story, that of a teenage girl becoming a demon and a monster through her period? The narrative of a girl’s demonic transformation triggered by a first period, or more broadly, by teenage-hood as a whole has been executed with varying degrees of success...

Evan Alex, Lupita Nyong'o and Shahadi Wright Joseph as Jason, Adelaide and Zora  Wilson  in Us. Courtesy of Universal Pictures. Warning: This article contains major spoilers for Us  (2019). Jordan Peele's second film, Us , begins as a benign home invasion movie, following the Wilson family on holiday as they are stalked and attacked by their doppelgangers (or as the film calls them, the tethered); however, it quickly becomes much more. Though Us tackles many themes with dexterity and nuance, the familial unit is front and centre, bringing particular attention to the relationships between family members and challenging our expectations of what a family should be in a horror film. When not neglected from the narrative entirely, horror film families are fragmented, abusive and sources of trauma; conflict tends to arise from within the family unit as a result of external forces (such as in The Shining, Pet Sematary or Poltergeist), destroying the family from the insi...