There are images in The Big Combo (1955) that are everything you want from a classic Film Noir. Opening with a woman stepping down a darkly lit corridor, backstage to a boxing match, pursued by suited figures. Later, a man in a suit wearing a hat emerges from the fog outside, stepping into a hangar to catch up with his nemesis.

Kathryn Bigelow and James Cameron's cyberpunk thriller starring Ralph Fiennes.

For a classic film noir, I settled upon Nightfall (1956) on a whim and the opening moments of Aldo Ray browsing a newspaper stand in the evening, and flinching when the streetlights came on overhead, that hooked me in. The city lights turn on and the title card appears with the woozy theme song. There’s something poetic and observational here, within the prelude to a crime story in Los Angeles.

On paper, Red Rooms is the ideal horror movie for a person like me, which is to say, a coward. It's a bloodless film that is rich with blood.

Well folks, we've entered our Ghost era of the Curb. This is the same old site you've known with the same interviews and reviews and the same passionate support for Australian cinema, just a little d...

Only after I finished watching Yokohama BJ Blues (1982) did I realise that the lead actor, Yusaku Matsuda, played the role of Sato the villain in the Michael Douglas action flick, Black Rain. I knew Matsuda was a Japanese movie star and was known for action films himself in the 1970s, and yet I just didn’t connect him to this shaggy haired blues singer named BJ who makes a living as a private detective, walking around the port town of Yokohama.

“We come to this place… for magic”, to quote our Nicole (Kidman, in the American theatre chain ads for AMC). For Issue 28 of VHS Tracking zine,...

Tyler Taormina’s sprawling portrait of an Italian-American family’s festive gathering in Long Island makes for an enjoyably hazy Christmas movie.

McConaughey voice: “Leatherface, you just gotta keep looking for those greenlights…” A video store staple is the cash-in ‘before they were stars’ release, particularly cheap looking DVDs with a badly photoshopped poster emphasising a big movie star in an early role. The Return of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1995), or as I saw it on video shelves, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation…

The poster of Halloween 4: The Return Of Michael Myers (1988) makes me think of seeing it in video store magazines, or seeing it in VHS tape sales in the centre of a strip mall. Being a kid, scared of horror movies but kind of curious, and trying to understand the lore of “Michael Myers is back to hunt his niece” or “Donald Pleasance returns as Dr.

As an Italian zombie flick, Burial Ground (1981) spends a lot of time with decaying zombie faces in close-up, crud-strewn make-up with maggots wriggling around. I couldn’t help but wonder… did the make-up artist apply the maggots carefully with a tweezer, or did they just dump a bucket upside down the zombie’s head and see what stuck? Part of the appeal and artistry with…

Somewhere between TV shows like Silk Stalkings and Forever Knight, there’s the direct-to-video horror thriller, Pale Blood (1990). A hang over of Miami Vice aesthetics employed in the service of arty genre trash. And yet, there’s a certain elegance here, thanks to the stoic presence of George Chakiris (from the original West Side Story) as a vampire who arrives in the City of Angels to track down a serial killer who is pretending to be a vampire, draining women of blood.

Reading a TV Guide description of Pumpkinhead (1988) as a kid, the type of movie that would only be programmed super late at night on a weekend, always intrigued me. A man gets revenge on the bikers who killed his boy by raising up a supernatural creature. Reading that it was directed by Stan Winston, known as the Special Effects guy of…

Alison’s Birthday (1981) lets you know it’s an Australian horror story through the shot of a Cold Chisel album on the floor when a seance goes haywire. At age 16, Alison (Joanne Samuel from Mad Max) is mucking around with a ouija board with a couple of school friends, and receives a warning from the other side: they’re after you, and it will happen on your 19th birthday.

There’s a masterclass sequence in Creepy (2016) that shows off Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s command with visually increasing uneasiness. A retired detective now a college professor Takakura (Hidetoshi Nishijima from Drive My Car) is working with his former partner Nogami (Masahiro Higashide) on a cold case, a missing family who disappeared five years ago. Within the university building, Takakura interviews the remaining family member, Saki (Haruna Kawaguchi) and the sequence begins in the clear afternoon, light coming in through the glass windows where we can see the students congregate in the square outside.

When a film communicates two emotions happening across a character’s face, all in the one shot, the magic trick of that. In the Mario Bava directed film, The Whip and The Body (1963), there’s a tre…

After seeing the repulsive yet effective thriller, Tenement, I was interested to see more of director Roberta Findlay’s mainstream 1980s genre work, after a previous decade of working in exploitation and pornography. The Oracle (1985) is a low-budget supernatural horror movie that uses the planchette as its hook - a silver artificial hand in a book that works like an Ouija board, in that if you guide the hand will automatically write on paper, a getaway to the other side and ghosts seeking to communicate.