Recently, someone encouraged me to write a few science fiction pieces with a positive outlook, maybe because there is a dominance of dystopian science fiction; a preponderance of horror and gloom within the genre. I get told that science fiction is often too gloomy in its outlook, needlessly creating bleak visions of the future as if to deter our...

FX’s award winning horror TV series, American Horror Story uses just about every familiar device of the horror genre, and yet the show has maintained complete originality for two seasons. The reason for this is that in both seasons of American Horror Story, the interplay of characters and plot has let us experience these horror clichés from a new range of...

Life of Pi (2012) arrived in cinemas at the end of last year amidst a babble of anticipation and speculation – how was this unfilmable book going to be adapted onto screen? The question wasn’t as in, “I wonder how they will do it?” but rather, “how is it possible to translate this book into a movie?”  Life of Pi isn’t the first book to be...

Colour symbolism is one of the most important ways that a film can communicate (non-verbally) with its audience, and yet it is often done with such subtlety that few moviegoers consciously notice it.  This effect changes from film to film — even the least invested filmgoers notice the striking visuals of a film like Hero– but, for the most part, the use of...

Just gotta say it: I love the Creepy Comics, now being published by Dark Horse Comics. Originally started in 1964, the late aughts run of the series has stayed true to its original narrative roots and tells B-flavoured, campy, spooky tales about ghosts, ghouls, and other glorious Monsters of the Week. These are the types of spooky tales that would feel at home...

Torture Porn is a genre label applied to a form of extremely violent and horrific cinema. Some of the most famous examples include the Hostel franchise (2005-2011) and the Saw series (2004-2010). When critics and commentators use the term ‘torture porn’ they are not explicitly speaking about pornography and torture combined, in fact pornography and...