Lauren Humphries-Brooks is a writer, editor, and media journalist. She holds a Master’s degree in Cinema Studies from New York University, and in Creative Writing from the University of Edinburgh. She regularly contributes to film and pop culture websites, and has written extensively on Classical Hollywood, British horror films, and the sci-fi, fantasy, and horror genres. She currently works as a freelance copyeditor and proofreader.
A recent spate of horror films have hit the ground running, as it were, taking just enough of their ninety-minute runtime to establish their characters before getting to the nastiness. Ready or Not is one of them, a perfectly paced tale of class warfare and mayhem, in which […]
Blackmail is one of Alfred Hitchcock’s most iconic and yet lesser-seen films. Much like many of his British films, poor quality public domain versions have floated around on DVD and on the internet for years now, images grainy and soundtrack barely decipherable. Kino Lorber’s release of Blackmail on […]
*Note: This is an analysis, not a review. There are spoilers throughout. Horror literature and horror films are characterized by the return of the repressed. The monsters represent the horrors of discrimination, abuse, violence, and oppression; the terror is expressed by mainstream society that those they’ve repressed will […]
As the film Darlin’ opens, a filthy, feral teenage girl (Lauryn Canny), identified as Darlin’ by the bracelet on her wrist, walks out of the woods accompanied by a Woman (Pollyanna McIntosh, who also directs), on her way to a hospital. Growling and frightened, she snarls at the […]
Hirotaka Adachi’s Stare opens as any good J-horror should: with an unseen evil and an explosion of blood. Stare takes the concept of a curse used to such excellent effect in Ringu and Ju-on, and transposes it to a scary story and the name of a woman “with […]
I’m going to do something I never do in a review: shout out to my friends/colleagues. Both Karen and Kristen informed me numerous times that when the Irish horror-comedy Extra Ordinary came to a festival, theater, or streaming service near me, I needed to see it. Okay, I […]
The Father’s Shadow expands director Gabriela Amaral Almeida’s concept of a short film into a fully fledged feature about an exceptional young girl coping with a distant father and deceased mother in Sao Paulo, Brazil. Dalva (Nina Medeiros) lives with her father, Jorge (Julio Machado), a construction worker, […]
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