What do you need for the perfect Christmas Day? Quick checklist: “Wait, what?” I hear you cry, having reached the last two of those. Since when have simmering hate-fuck sexual tension and…
Category: FILM
GHOST STORIES FOR CHRISTMAS: THE TELEVISION TRADITION -Robert Kenchington
Christmas, 1971: the BBC enters its golden age. As the new-fangled colour service opens up to an expanding television audience around the United Kingdom, ‘Auntie Beeb’ fills the schedules with a range…
REVIEW: Yours Cruelly, Elvira: Memoirs of the Mistress of the Dark by Cassandra Peterson (Hachette) – Neil Fulwood
Cassandra Peterson has had quite the life. Bullying mother. Rough diamond father. Traumatic childhood accident (pan; boiling water). Socially awkward. Suddenly voluptuous. Go-go dancer in her mid-teens. Showgirl while still a good…
ELEGY IN A ZOMBIE-INFESTED CHURCHYARD: THE WEIRD AESTHETIC OF REQUIEM FOR A VILLAGE – Lucy Bellingham
What’s the weirdest zombie film you’ve ever seen? Zombeavers? Fido? Anna and the Apocalypse? I’ll see you and I’ll raise you: David Gladwell’s Requiem for a Village. Gladwell is mainly remembered as the editor of Lindsay…
COMICAL LITTLE GEEZERS: The ups and downs of PERFORMANCE
Here are some of the things Performance fetishises: Performance is about a lot of things, principally the merging and blurring of identities. With a specific focus on sexual identities (today’s word on Sesame Street is “troilism”). It’s…
Please Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark: Time, imagination, grief and the quest for meaning in Don’t Look Now
The central nervous system conventionalises reality for us so that we can move through time and space … We’ve inherited large parts of our view of the world from our forebears hundreds…
LANDSCAPE AND MINDSCAPE: The fragmented spaces of Donald Cammell’s ‘White of the Eye’
Following their collaboration on Performance – arguably the most influential counter-culture film to come out of the UK in the ‘70s – Nic Roeg went on to make 16 feature films, various shorts, and…
INSECTS, TINFOIL AND ASHLEY JUDD: The crazed brilliance of William Friedkin’s BUG
When you think of William Friedkin, you think of big set pieces crammed with detail. The exorcism and the myriad ways in which a demonic force kicks back in The Exorcist. The car/L-train…
DANGEROUS PAYLOAD: FRIEDKIN’S SORCERER AND THE LONG SHADOW OF THE WAGES OF FEAR – Neil Fulwood
Sorcerer was meant to be a modest, low-cost production; a filler between The Exorcist and a big-budget project called The Devil’s Triangle which was intended to capitalise on the former’s box office supremacy. The very idea of…
The City as Anti-Hero: Freidkin’s To Live and Died in L.A. – Neil Fulwood
7th August 2025 marks the second anniversary of the death of maverick filmmaker William Friedkin. CHAINLINK publishes a series of articles on his work throughout the month. By the mid-Eighties, William Friedkin’s…
WHAT. THE. ACTUAL? – HAUSU AND THE COMPLETE DERANGEMENT OF THE SENSES
About twenty minutes into Hausu – which translates, fairly obviously, as House, but which I’m going to refer to Hausu throughout this review purely to piss off autocorrect – seven friends hop off a train at a…
BOY A – Amy Clarke
Boy A “They said I can choose my own name, any name?” says Eric Wilson, a.k.a. Jack Burridge, in the opening scene of Boy A. It’s a line that immediately establishes what…
Friday the 13th -Lucy Bellingham
Whither Jason? – The Drama and Dichotomy of Friday the 13th Sean S. Cunningham’s Friday the 13th might not have been the first slasher – not by a long chalk – but…