It’s nearly 20 years since James Wan’s Saw (2004) kicked off an unlikely franchise, elevating familiar bit player Tobin Bell to horror stardom as John Kramer (aka Jigsaw) and trademarking a unique mode of horror sequence in which a hapless victim struggles in the coils of a torture contraption which can be escaped if they’re willing to perform painful auto-surgery and learn a lesson about the value of human life. 

Between 2004 and 2010, there were seven Saws, culminating in Saw 3D. Since then the series has tried reboots via a pick-up-the-plot-threads-a-decade-on sequel Jigsaw and a spinoff Spiral From the Book of Saw. Neither of those quite clicked with fans, so Saw X goes back to the original run and tells a story which slots in somewhere between Saw and Saw III and finds Bell back on form as a psycho who is here unambiguously, a vigilante hero doing horrid things to people who really, really deserve it.

Kevin Greutert has worked on most of the Saws in some capacity and is back securely in the director’s chair while the Piranha 3D team of Josh Stolberg and Pete Goldfinger – who did the last two spinoffs – invent a fresh, odious opponent for Kramer in Synnove Macody Lund’s Dr Cecilia Pederson, an icy blonde malpractitioner who at one point seems ruthless enough to trap Jigsaw in one of his own games. 

The death traps are showy but perhaps a bit samey – we miss such series heights as the corrupt judge nearly drowned in liquidised maggoty hog carcasses (Saw III) and the roulette wheel of shotguns revolving around the office workers who invalidate insurance claims (Saw VI) – though it builds up to a classic game of double- and triple-bluff. 

Bell shows a softer side – though not to victims, obviously – and deserves plaudits for his consitently affecting performance.

Saw X is out in cinemas now.

In The Death I Gave Him by Em X Liu, Hayden Lichfield’s world shatters when he discovers his father has been murdered and crucial camera logs in their lab have been deleted. The motive is clear: the coveted Sisyphus Formula, capable of potentially defying death. To draw out the killer, Hayden attempts to abscond with the research, and in doing so stumbles across a recording left by his father, beseeching him to avenge his death…

Trapped in the locked-down lab, Hayden is surrounded by four potential suspects: his uncle Charles, lab tech Gabriel Rasmussen, intern Felicia Xia, and her father and security head, Paul — any one of whom could be the killer.

Hayden’s only trustworthy ally is Horatio, the lab’s AI, a trusted companion since its inception. As Hayden grapples with a crumbling reality, he must unravel the lab’s enigmas, expose his father’s deceptions, and teeter on the edge of reason to exact his revenge.

Billed as a queer retelling of Hamlet through the lens of a locked-room thriller, Em X. Liu’s novel is built around a cleverly and deliberately constructed narrative. A woven tapestry of fabricated interviews, autobiography excerpts, AI recordings, and speculative sequences, the story is then contextualised with a selection of footnotes serving as commentary from an unidentified narrator.

This framing technique creates enough distance from the Shakespearean inspiration such as to allow the story to breathe on its own merit. The parallels to Hamlet and its themes of life, death, madness and privilege are clear and present, but by serving them within a near-future setting where the promise of eternal life through advancements in science are just within humanity’s grasp, Liu is able to provide a freshness to the preconceptions that would normally weigh down the concept.

Addictive and nuanced, this is not just a Hamlet rip-off, but an intelligent evolution of a classic. Deploying innovative storytelling techniques acts as an intelligent distraction from assumed foregone conclusions. Dressed up in a science fiction jacket, Em X. Liu is able to lean heavily into character, leveraging assumed tropes to smartly captivate readers despite the fact that we all think we know the ending.

The Death I Gave Him is available in hardback now from Solaris 

A decade on from the release of James Wan’s terrifying The Conjuring comes a sequel to The Nun spinoff which marks the ninth film in this particular horror universe that also includes the Annabelle films.

Directed by Michael Chaves (The Curse of La Llorona) the film is light on jump scares, big on gothic atmosphere and unfortunately lacking in a satisfying narrative. For the most part, it’s a plodding horror-by-numbers that leads to a fantastic finale with some decent frights but it takes far too long to get there and everything is heavily signposted along the way.

The film begins in 1956 in France when a priest inexplicably sets on fire in front of an altar boy. Meanwhile, across the country, Sister Irene (Taissa Farmiga reprising her role) is hiding away in a convent following the events of the first film. When she takes Novice, Debra (Storm Reid) under her wing they spark up a friendship with the young nun following Irene when her expertise is called upon to investigate the reappearance of the demon nun Valak.

The rest of the film takes place in an all-girls boarding school where an Irish teacher (Anna Popplewell) and her daughter (who is being bullied by the local girls) are finding their place. There’s also a romantic thread to the long-winded and frankly tedious storyline that starts off an interesting note about mother-daughter relationships, racism, grief and faith but fails to tackle its themes in any compelling ways.

Reid’s character is underdeveloped, with her initial backstory completely forgotten by the end of the film. Farmiga is as ever on form with a sensitive turn and her deeply emotive facial expressions delivering the goods. There’s at least some attempt to conclude her mother-daughter afflictions even if it’s handled poorly. This entry into The Conjuring Universe isn’t even bad enough to be amusing and deserves to be thrown on a funeral pyre for its sins.

The Nun II will be in cinemas on 8 September 2023.

Times of London, the first book in Henry Chebaane’s Panharmonion Chronicles series is a genre-bending, super-powered time travel tale packed with unique perspectives and fantastical concepts.

When orphaned Canadian musician Alex Campbell inherits an enormous, run-down Victorian London house from a mysterious ancestor, she moves to the UK in the hopes of transforming the house into a Boutique Hotel, looking for a fresh start from her tragic history. But with the house built on top of an ancient secret, a sinister corporation rears its head seeking to get its hands on the property… by any means necessary.

What follows is an explosion of science fiction and steampunk splendour. Times of London features time travel, portals, sinister corporations, superpowers and even blimps! With a story so jam-packed with delicious concepts it’s a testament to Chebaane’s writing that it all interlocks so cleanly, laying out a sandpit of enticing alt-history that you just can’t help but want to play in.

Chebaane has clearly given everything to this story in a way that only indie comics publishing can allow. It transports you across times and cultures you’d never normally see. Lavie Tidhar’s Adler is a good touchstone for the steampunk aesthetic and female protagonist, though in Times of London a deliberate choice is made to make the lead of Canadian First Nation heritage, garnishing the story with an enlightening new perspective. There is true diversity in the characters, with their backgrounds informing decisions that drive the narrative in unexpected ways.

Fans of Garth Ennis’ Preacher series will relish the clandestine battle against a malevolent corporation claiming religious piety. On the surface, this battle of good vs moustache-twirling antagonist is enjoyable enough, but digging deeper, the real villainy is shrouded in the greed of 19th century industrialists with a nice alt-history sci-fi twist.

The artwork of Stephen Baskerville (Transformers, Judge Dredd) crystallises Chebaane’s abstract concepts with an electric vibrancy that draws you deeper into a story that is clearly just beginning. As an opening salvo to a fantastical new (and old) world, Times of London bursts with new ideas as well as twists on themes and concepts that will slot neatly into many a sci-fi fan’s wheelhouse and bookshelf.

Times of London: The Panharmonion Chronicles is available now. Find out more here.

Transmission begins with a satellite flashing a red light over Earth, and a large radar dish below picking up its signal – which is to say that, as the film’s very title suggests, here the medium is the message, along with its means of distribution.

As text announces that many years ago something strange happened on every television screen, and promises to show what one channel-surfing old man witnessed that night, we are made to realise that this is to be, apart from the scenes right at its beginning and end, a screenlife film – except that instead of switching between windows on a computer screen, it shows in real time what is being broadcast across multiple TV stations, as remixed by one casual – or perhaps not so casual – viewer.

What follows is a serial montage of live news reports (on murder suicides across the city and an armed hostage siege in a woman’s suburban home), a black-and-white sitcom about a married couple struggling to tune in their TV set, a children’s show with puppets doing a jigsaw puzzle, an evangelical preacher talking fire and brimstone, a dumb-assed Eighties teen romance called Nutballs! (somewhere between Say Anything… and Screwballs), porn and ads.

Yet if our unseen viewer is desultory, restless and impatient, there are two related programmes on which he settles the longest: the première screening of the sci-fi horror Transmission, long believed lost but now being introduced by an Elvira-like presenter (Jennifer Nangle) on her show Malvolia’s Movie Madness; and meanwhile, over on Incredibly Strange Movies, a documentary made by Rachel Roth (Nicole Cinaglia) which uncovers the story of her grandfather Frank Tadross Roth (Vernon Wells), the cult (and occult-obsessed) horror director who went missing under mysterious circumstances before his final film Transmission could be completed and released.

“So, are you sure all these pieces are gonna fit together?” wonders an on-screen muppet of the puzzle he is trying to assemble. “Oh they will, I promise,” replies his fellow puppet, “You’ll see.” Anyone who has ever flipped between channels, bleary-eyed in the wee hours, will know the strange experience of cross-talk that can ensue, as the brain synthesises disparate programmes as though they were all presenting a single if fractured narrative customised for and by the holder of the remote control. This is the effect of watching Transmission, whose varied programming starts to echo and blur with maddening metacommentary, as these different shows reflect each other in surprising ways.

Malvolia is not only presenting the film-within-a-film Transmission, but also appears as a talking head in the documentary on its director, while other participants in the documentary will appear on the live news, and all these broadcasts will bleed into each other in an unexpected manner.

Indeed, it is not unlike one of Frank’s films, in which, according to Malviola, “there are usually three or four different storylines that come together in some crazy way, and then they usually build up to some sort of dark, twisted ending.” Even though Frank’s last film, which riffs on Mario Bava’s Planet of the Vampires (1965) and Paul W.S Anderson’s Event Horizon (1997), is said to have been shot from a script whose last five pages were never written, and is thought never to have been fully filmed, everything here comes with the strong sense of an ending, as numerous signs point to an ominously approaching if unguessable apocalypse which in the end will be duly, yet impossibly, delivered.

There are different traditions (all niche) feeding into writer/director Michael Hurst’s feature. First there is the paradoxical notion of a lost film maudit which, Medusa-like, has a baleful effect on anyone unfortunate to cast eyes upon it. This is an idea explored in the pseudo-documentary features of  Fabien Delage’s Fury of the Demon (La rage de démon, 2016) and David Amito and Michael Laicini’s Antrum: The Deadliest Movie Ever Made (2019) – except that here there are layers upon layers of forbidden film, as Hurst’s Transmission, Frank’s Transmission within it, and another illicit piece of video placed within several programmes, all threaten to endanger viewers (including us) with pernicious content that “wants to be seen”.

Second, there is a variation on the haunted broadcasts seen in Lesley Manning’s Ghostwatch (1992), Damien LeVeck’s The Cleansing Hour (2019), Cristian Ponce’s History of the Occult (Historia de lo Oculto, 2020)  and Cameron and Colin Cairnes’ Late Night With The Devil (2023) – films where live transmissions either unleash or expose a diabolical underpinning to our mediated reality.

As a long-term genre fan on a transgressive quest for essential horror that gets past cheap thrills and easy catharsis, Frank will – at least up to a point – be a figure of identification for any hardened horror viewers, and his hidden collection of VHS hauls from abroad will seem familiar to anyone who grew up in the Video Nasty era. Even his obsessive search for a film made by Dario Cozzi (Robin Hill), whose very name conflates Italian genre directors Dario Argento and Luigi Cozzi, will be relatable to the very particular audience of Transmission, as will his proselytising desire to have horror seen in everything and by everyone.

Yet in this film, set in the conventionally fictive Californian twilight zone of Santa Mira, it is not just horror viewers, but also the infinite, insatiable emptiness of their desires, that is being revealed. For here we are all seeking answers in the Void, yet finding them in the most unexpected and innocuous places. What greater display could there be of humanity’s worst side than a cavalcade of inane witching-hour viewing? You are, after all, what you choose to watch – and if you choose not to watch Hurst’s (and Frank’s) multimedia feature to its bitter end, you might miss out on one hell of a Lovecraftian punchline – or what Malvolia describes as “the never before seen conclusion”. What self-respecting horrorhound can resist staring into that abyss?

Transmission had its world première at FrightFest 2023 on 26 August

J-Horror typically features alienated individuals and viral curses, and uses technology – whether outgoing and analogue, like hand-me-down VHS cassettes, or incoming and digital, like the internet – as the medium for its uncanny hauntings.

As its very title implies, the key thesis of Sarah Appleton and Jasper Sharp’s documentary The J-Horror Virus is that this distinctive form of Japanese ghost movie, emerging around the turn of the millennium, spread through not only Japan’s film culture, but the world’s, like one of those infectious, self-replicating viruses that so often propel its narratives, and that leave their sinister trace everywhere even as they mutate.

Of course, every pandemic has its index case, its patient zero, its epicentre – and for this genre, it is Hideo Nakata’s Ring (1998), placed literally at the film’s centre. Yet if, both in its title and in its central image of the round entrance to a deep, dark well, Ring foregrounds absence – like the hole in a donut – capturing the emptiness of its characters’ lives and of their last-ditch efforts to go on living, then there is also a conspicuous absence in The J-Horror Virus. For while an impressive array of J-horror directors appears in the film, including Teruyoshi Ishii (Psychic Vision), Kiyoshi Kurosawa (Sweet Home; Cure; Pulse), Norio Tsuruta (Scary True Stories, Ring 0), Joji Iida (Spiral, 1999), Takashi Shimizu (Ju-on: The Grudge; Marebito), and while comments are solicited in the discussion of Ring from its screenwriter Hiroshi Takahashi and actress Rie Ino’o (who played Sadako), Nakata himself, who is the director of Ring – and of my favourite J-horror Dark Water (2002) – is notably absent, even if his influence, like that of a ghost, can still be felt.

Perhaps, though, there is a point, besides no doubt the pragmatics of his unavailability, to Nakata’s absence. For even if The J-Horror Virus correctly privileges Ring – now sequelised, satirised and remade – as the film that put J-Horror on the international map and economically established for a broader audience what were coming to be the tropes of this new genre, Appleton and Sharp are just as interested in the periphery of J-horror, its antecedents and afterlife.

With help from the filmmakers, as well as scholarly commentary from Lindsay Nelson, Tom Mes and Sharp himself, the film traces the traditional iconography of the vengeful female spirit, with characteristic white robes and long black hair, right back to classic kaidan (ghost stories) or kabuki plays like Yotsuya Ghost Story, The Peony Lantern or The House of Broken Plates.

Meanwhile, the revolutionary shift to a modern setting, to a haunted tape reel, and to ghosts that just stand in the background of ordinary daylit settings, goes back to the mockumentary video Psychic Vision (1988) and was developed further by Scary True Stories (1991), whlle Tsuruta’s influential Super Horror Experience 4: Psychic Video (1995) featured a haunted video. Meanwhile, the Haunted School television miniseries took J-horror conventions from V-cinema to the much broader audience of television, popularising the genre and giving rise to the term ‘J-horror’, as well as spawning a series of adapted theatrical versions.

Another popular made-for-television J-horror was Joji Iida’s feature-length Ring: Kanzenban (1995), screened three years before Nakata and Takahashi would adapt the same source novel into Ring, and one year before Nakata would direct the first theatrical J-horror Don’t Look Up (1996) – and then there is the odd excellent outlier like Cure (1997), not quite J-horror but certainly drawing on the genre’s imagery and alienating vibe. Takashi Miike’s Audition (1999), released a year after Ring came out, similarly strikes its own tortu(r)ous path.

Still much J-horror that comes out after Ring is in its shadow while chasing its success. A string of J-horror remakes – Gore Verbinksi’s The Ring (2002), Takashi Shimizu’s The Grudge (2004), Walter Salles’ Dark Water (2005), Jim Sonzero’s Pulse (2006) and Eric Vallette’s One Missed Call (2008) – all convert their Japanese models into American horror idioms, while their excess exposition and more aggressive ghosts ensure that the subtlety and irrationality of the originals become lost in translation (something which The Grudge, with its Americans disoriented and doomed in Tokyo, literalises). Being able to see these film side by side exposes national difference, while highlighting what makes the Japanese films so special. Yet J-Horror has become a globalised phenomenon, its motifs and mannerisms, its spooks and sensibilities, now a recognisable feature of horror cinema the world over.

“The J-Horror film genre could be made in any country,” Kurosawa observes, “I think that is the greatest significance of J-Horror.” With their team of articulate interlocutors, Appleton and Sharp tap into, and tease apart, just what it is about this expanding body of films that is both so culturally specific, and so universally appealing.

The J-Horror Virus has its world première on Friday 25th August at FrightFest 2023. Read more reviews at SciFiNow.