British Horror - vo.rs

His House: A Ghost Story About Asylum and Debt

Sun, 28 Jun 2026 09:00:00 +0000

The best haunted-house films are never really about the house. They are about the people who cannot leave it, and why. His House, Remi Weekes’s astonishingly assured 2020 debut, understands this so completely that it builds its entire architecture — literal and dramatic — around a couple who are told, in plain bureaucratic English, that they are not permitted to move. Bol and Rial are asylum seekers from South Sudan, granted a fragile probationary status in England on the condition that they stay put in the dilapidated council house assigned to them. The ghosts arrive almost immediately. The trap was set before the haunting started, and it was set by an immigration officer with a clipboard.

The Descent: The Best British Horror of Its Decade

Fri, 23 May 2025 09:00:00 +0000

There is a stretch in the middle of The Descent — after the passage collapses, before anything with teeth appears — where the film is simply six women in a hole in the ground realising no one knows where they are. No monster. No score to speak of. Just rock, dark, and the dawning arithmetic of being trapped. That stretch is the reason Neil Marshall’s 2005 film is the best British horror of its decade, and possibly the best British creature feature ever made. It understood that the crawlers were a bonus. The cave was the horror.

Ten Essential Folk-Horror Films

Fri, 07 Mar 2025 13:00:00 +0000

Folk horror is the genre that distrusts the countryside. Where the slasher fears the stranger and the ghost story fears the house, folk horror fears the ground itself — the old belief that never quite died out, the isolated community with its own private arithmetic of guilt and harvest, the outsider who arrives certain of his own modernity and discovers the land was here long before him and intends to outlast him. The critic Adam Scovell narrowed the recurring shape to a useful formula: a landscape, an isolation, a skewed set of beliefs, and a summoning that follows from all three. Here are ten films that build it, spanning nearly a century and three continents, arranged so you can watch the tradition grow rather than stumble on it piecemeal. All spoiler-free.

Folk Horror's Long Road From The Wicker Man to Midsommar

Fri, 08 Dec 2023 13:00:00 +0000

Folk horror is the genre that grows in the gaps of a map. Its terror is a place rather than a monster or a killer: a village, an island, a field, somewhere the modern world has thinned out and something older has kept its footing. The films that belong to it share a shape you can feel before you can name it, a sense of the pastoral gone wrong, of a landscape that is watching, of communities practising a faith the visitor mistook for quaintness until it closed over his head. The road from The Wicker Man in 1973 to Midsommar in 2019 is nearly half a century long, and it runs through a dormancy so complete that the term itself had to be reinvented, but the shape survives the whole journey intact.

Kill List: Ben Wheatley's Bait-and-Switch into the Dark

Thu, 16 Oct 2014 09:00:00 +0000

Ben Wheatley’s Kill List (2011) is the film that made me trust him, and it did it by lying to me for forty minutes. You sit down to what appears to be a hard British drama about a marriage falling apart at a dinner table, and by the closing frames you are somewhere that should not be reachable from that starting point, a torchlit hillside where robed figures are chanting. The astonishing thing is that the route is real. Watch it a second time and every turn is signposted; the film only feels like a betrayal because you were not paying the right kind of attention. That is the trick, and it is a genuine one.