Small Dark Things

Guillermo del Toro is one of my favourite directors. Only a few years ago, while at Fan Expo in Toronto, I had the opportunity to meet him in person. Unaware of his guest appearance, I had a fleeting chance encounter in the hallway outside the exhibition space – I recognized him straight away though his back…

I have been thinking about Neil Jordan’s In Dreams (1999) a lot lately for some reason. As luck would have it, a DVD copy appeared to me mysteriously from within a $9.99 bin at a music and film store, and so I purchased it and rewatched it this past weekend. Having been a while since I…

First published in the early 1890s, this short story by Charlotte Perkins Gilman is not only an eerie tale of a woman sequestered to her room and experiencing what seem to be hallucinations, visions of a woman trapped in the mesmerizing wallpaper pattern; it is also a reflection on attitudes to towards mental illness in women…

Along Edinburgh’s Royal Mile, buried beneath what is now the City Chambers, lies a length of narrow alleyway (a close), lined with the remnants of dark empty houses and rooms whose floorboards are still intact after hundreds of years. If you peer into some of the doors left open by the tour company, you can see for…

Hate being disappointed by a horror film I have hopes for… You build it up in your mind and compare it to other like films that have won you over before. Maybe you anticipate a certain level of production quality based on a sampling of the trailer, the cast, the crew, etc. And then something is inevitably…