Niche Film Writings

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...

Hell is a Teenage Girl: Megan Fox as Jennifer Check in Jennifer's Body. Courtesy of Fox Atomic. Karyn Kusama's Jennifer's Body is a sharply witty horror-comedy with all the ingredients for a genre film success. It follows a high school girl, Amanita 'Needy' Lesnicki, whose best friend, Jennifer, becomes possessed by a demon and starts preying on and eating fellow high schoolers, and was written by Diablo Cody only two years after she received an Academy Award for best original screenplay for her 2007 film Juno.  Starring Amanda Seyfried and Megan Fox, both fresh out of box office blockbuster hits ( Mamma Mia! grossing $615 million in 2008 and Transformers  grossing $709 million in 2007, respectively), Jennifer's Body should have been a successful Halloween-time release for Kusama, a relatively unknown director looking for a chance to break through. Horror films are infamous for their money-grabbing, superficial tendencies, doing anything for a quick prof...

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...