If his name doesn't sound particularly Japanese, well you'd be right: but Dave Boyle, the American writer/director of Never After Dark, studied Japanese at university and has a history of incorporating Japanese themes (and cast members) into his projects.
So it's perhaps not surprising that his latest, a first foray into the realms of the supernatural, feels entirely authentic in atmosphere. But upfront it's worth mentioning that Boyle is not here to reproduce the usual elements of J-horror; Never After Dark is for the most part a slow, meditative piece, rather than a fright flick per se.
Airi (Moeka Hoshi) is, when we first meet her, driving to the location of her latest job. In the back seat is a young girl (Karumi Inagaki), seen reflected in the rear view mirror. The first impression is that this is either a mother/daughter setup or a standard older/younger sibling relationship. It's the latter but with one exception; the young girl is dead and can be only be seen by her sibling, who is a psychic for hire (the bittersweetness of this is compounded by Airi originally being the younger sister).
The employer in question is the welcoming but frightened Teiko (Tae Kimura) and her sceptical son Gunji (Kento Kaku). The pair have bought a huge house, a former hotel in the middle of nowhere, with a view to renovating it. But any plans have been halted because Teiko is being constantly haunted by the spirit of an unnamed man (Mutsuo Yoshioka); Airi has been employed to lay the ghost or, in her sister's words, "help them become unstuck and go to the next world".
A condition of the job is that Airi works alone (although her sister is constantly on hand to offer advice and support); Teiko and Ginji decamp to a local hotel. But not for long; the pair constantly return to the house to assess progress, even though Airi assures them that the process is pretty boring to observe, one which she only carries out during the day (hence the film's title).
But we do at least understand Teiko's concerns when Airi witnesses the apparition, a gaunt man with a hideous injury to the lower half of his face. However, it's not just the spirit with whom the ghost layer has to contend; the whole house, with its clocks that run backwards and a hidden compartment containing a tin box full of teeth, seems weird. Airi and her recently departed spirit assistant must solve the mystery of the haunting - even if the source of it may be earthbound in nature - using old school rituals such as hair burning and even a Victorian phenakistoscope, in increasingly desperate attempts to exorcise the restless spirit.
As others have commented, the closest comparator for the unusual goings on in Never After Dark is Ti West's 2011 movie The Innkeepers. Both movies offer a slow burn spooky setup whose cast of odd characters is as disconcerting as the central supernatural theme. Boyle's movie is arguably too slow at times, despite a final revelatory reel, but Hoshi and Iangaki give us a likeable pair of ghost hunters, and Boyle's attention to detail and mood creates a sustained atmosphere of weirdness and, on more than one occasion, profound sadness.
Never After Dark is released on digital platforms from 2 November.
My records show that its been six years since I brought you 10 slices of Halloween ham for your delectation. The 2019 round up is here and the 2020 one here. Not sure why the gap existed. Anyway...
#10 - The Dracula Trot - Hans Conried and Alice Pearce - this 1959 number appeared on an RCA Victor album called 'Monster Rally'. Conried and Pearce were both actors; the former voiced Captain Hook and Snidely Whiplash (the latter ripped off by Paul Winchell for his Dick Dastardly voice on Wacky Races), while Pearce’s is perhaps best known as the first Mrs. Kravitz on TVs Bewitched (she died young of cancer at the age of 48). The musical director is listed as “Frank N. Stein” but was likely the arranger/conductor Joel Herron, who is credited as co-writer on seven songs on the album.
#9 - Werewolf - The Frantics - hailing from Seattle, Washington, The Frantics started out as a duo called the Hi-Fis. After recruiting a bassist and a drummer, they were known as the Four Frantics and finally just The Frantics. The band at various points included three members of Moby Grape. 'Werewolf' was released twice; it was a B side of a 1959 Dolton Records single and then re-released a year later, again on Dolton, as an A side, with an instrumental version of the song on the B side. The spoken section is performed by Dolton's founder Bob Reisdorff, quoting lines from the 1941 movie The Wolf Man.
#8 - You Can Get Him Frankenstein - The Castle Kings - the first of two singles by a US doo-wop group, location sadly not known, recorded in 1961. One of the vast number of songs which cashed in on the TV broadcasting of Universal monster movies (and the subsequent Aurora model kits), 'You Can Get Him Frankenstein' was co-written by the band's guitarist, Ed Adlum, and one Phil Spector. The vocalist was Frank Tinelli. The single's B side was an uptempo version of the Scottish standard 'Loch Lomond'.
#7 - Mad Witch - Dave Gardner - although this was recorded in 1957 somehow it feels a lot older. 'Mad Witch' was the first single by Tennessee born Gardner - nicknamed 'Brother Dave' following a one-semester term as a Southern Baptist ministerial student - who came to the attention of RCA Records when his amusing between song chats propelled him into the national eye, along with the first of several appearances on national television talk/variety shows such as The Tonight Show. As a comedian he was variously described as a 'Southern Lenny Bruce' or 'Billy Graham with a sense of humour'. There aren't many laughs in this rather amphetamine fuelled backwoods number, but it's a good 'un.
#6 - The Crewnecks - Rockin' Zombie - ever wondered where Lux Interior went for his inspiration? Pennsylvanian vocal group could be the answer; or one of 'em anyway. A five piece, all students from Wilkes College, were active between 1957 and 1961; Rockin' Zombie dates from 1959. After a successful touring nightclub act and extensive TV appearances, the band eventually broke up because of military service commitments.
#5 - The Ghouls - Dracula's Deuce - the 1964 brainchild of Gary Usher, an American rock musician, songwriter, and record producer, who worked with numerous California acts in the 1960s, including the Byrds, the Beach Boys and Dick Dale. Just one of a billion acts to have taken their inspiration from the 1962 smash hit 'Monster Mash' by Bobby (Boris) Pickett And The Crypt-Kickers, The Ghouls comprised seasoned session players like Bill Cooper, Dick Burns, and Richard Podolor and, unlike many of their contemporaries, actually organised themselves to record a whole album of this stuff, also titled 'Dracula's Deuce'. It's pretty good!
#4 - Frankenstein's Party - The Swingin' Phillies - 1957's only single by this Philadelphia vocal group composed of Charles Cosom, Philip Hurtt, Richard Hill, Ronald Headon and Al Hurtt, the founder of the combo. The boys formed after discovering each other at their church. A pre 'Monster Mash' song, as well as the usual suspects this also references 'Blueberry Hill', a song which had become a massive smash covered by Fats Domino a year before this, 'Long Tall Sally' after the 1956 Little Richard hit, and Mighty Joe Young, a 1949 King Kong sequel which has been re-released into cinemas the year this single came out.
#3 - Dr Frankenstein's Disco Party - Johnny Wakelin - On this side of the pond for a change, Brighton's Wakelin was born in 1939, his biggest claims to fame being two songs about boxer Muhammed Ali, 'Black Superman' and the proto Burundi hit 'In Zaire'. But it was his 1977 album 'Africa Man' that yielded this internationally released classic. "All his invitations are delivered by a bat; Transylvania they do it like that" purrs Johnny, in between repeating the title...a lot.
#2 - Witchfinder General - Carl Douglas - staying with da funk, albeit a little more authentically, is disco king Douglas, born in 1942 in Kingston, Jamaica. After moving to the UK to study sound engineering, he had some success in the 1960s both as a solo artist and as part of the group 'Carl Douglas And The Big Stampede'. While his biggest hit was 'Kung Fu Fighting', the first track on his 1974 debut LP 'Kung Fu Fighter' issued a year later (and named to cash in on the popularity of Bruce Lee and martial arts), the second track on the album was this bizarre homage to Matthew Hopkins, the 'Witchfinder General' of history, popularised in Michael Reeves's 1968 film of the same name. "Says he's got a thing about burnin' witches, ooh, some of these were mighty fine bitches, nobody knows if he's doin' right, another cord, he does 'em all, ride right through the night" sings Carl. Of course he does.
#1 - S.O.S - The Marshmallow Ghosts - this track is taken from The Marshmallow Ghosts 2019 LP 'The Old Witch's Cavern'. The MGs have been bringing out a Halloween themed vinyl every year since 2009; there's something about their sound that encapsulates the kind of holiday I've always wanted, a bit trashy, a little bit scary, American but not too American. The story behind this LP is that the band - actually a collective of musicians who put out music on the Georgia based Graveface Records label - came across some tapes used in a now closed haunted mine attraction in that State and set them to music. Full disclosure; I paid a LOT for this album and will continue to support their annual seasonal releases because for me, this is Halloween.
I was originally pointed to the existence of Pakeezah by my wife; it's one of her treasured films, not least because it was her own now late mother's favourite and she has precious memories of both of them enjoying it together.
My own exposure to 'Bollywood' cinema (and I don't really like that term) was, until Amrohi's movie, pretty slight. I'd caught the odd late night feature on Channel 4 back in the day, finding them energetic but slightly impenetrable, so when we first saw this film together, at a BFI screening several years ago, I was impressed but still a little cool; always an uncomfortable position when your significant other values something so much.
Flash forward a few years and the BFI's choice to show a restored Pakeezah on their IMAX screen for the last day of the 2026 LFF was an opportunity not to be missed, particularly as the film was introduced by the director's son and sister, respectively Tajdar and Rukhsaar Amrohi.
There are many great pieces of writing on the gestation and lengthy development of Pakeezah, covering the fractured relationship between the allegedly controlling Amrohi and his troubled wife Meena Kumari, the star of the film, who would die shortly after its release at the age of 39; I'll let you read those rather than reproduce that history here.
As you would expect from a 153 minute film, Pakeezah's story has many complexities. Split into two parts, the first concerns a famous courtesan, Nargis (Kumari) who dreams of marrying Shahbuddin (Ashok Kumar) but is prevented from doing this by his father, Hakim Saab (D. K. Sapru). Rejected, she flees to a nearby cemetery, giving birth to a daughter before dying, but not before she writes Shahbuddin a letter asking him to come for his child. Nargis' sister Nawabjaan (Veena) discovers Nargis's body and brings the baby home with her.
17 years later the daughter, named Sahibjaan (also Kumari) is also a courtesan at Nawabjaan's brothel. Shahbuddin comes into possession of the letter and tracks down his now-adult daughter, claiming her for his own, but she's stolen away. While travelling by train, a young man enters Sahibjaan's compartment and sees her sleeping. Struck by her beauty, he leaves her a note. After arriving at her destination, Sahibjaan wakes up and finds the note. She reads it and falls in love with the note's author. Meanwhile a wealthy patron, Nawab (Kamal Kapoor) steals Sahibjaan away on his boat, but it's attacked by elephants; shipwrecked, she's taken to the tent of forest ranger Salim (Raaj Kumar) who works out that she was the woman he met on the train.
Sahibjaan feigns amnesia to avoid telling him of her profession, and although she's taken back to the brothel again she escapes and is nearly run over by a train; luckily Salim is on hand to rescue her, where the pair plan to elope; he renames her 'Pakeezah'; the pure one. But, scared of declaring her profession, once again she returns to the brothel; Salim decides to marry someone else but asks Sahibjaan to dance at his wedding. . During the recital, Nawabjaan recognises Shahbuddin, Salim's paternal uncle, and calls him to witness the irony of the situation: his own daughter dancing and entertaining his family. Shahbuddin's father tries to shoot Nawabjaan to silence her but instead kills Shahbuddin who was trying to protect her. With his dying breath, Shahbuddin asks Salim to marry Sahibjaan. Salim's wedding palanquin defies convention and arrives at Sahibjaan's brothel, fulfilling Shahbuddin's dying wish.
Because of the absence of original elements, Pakeezah's restoration is far from perfect, but the combination of the rich Eastmancolor - particularly in the exterior scenes of the second half of the film - coloured by legendary matte artist Ivor (Black Narcissus and The Red Shoes) Beddoes (credited as Ivory Bedos), and the overall hazy look is extraordinary. Veteran 'Bollywood' cinematographer Josef Wirsching manages immense sweeping vistas of the sumptuous countryside and extraordinary crane shots as the camera explores the complicated brothel sets, a fabulous setting for the songs and dances that bring the film to life. As my wife noted within the libretto Sahibjaan is a quiet character without agency; when she sings and dances her character is brought to life and she becomes an elemental force. It's an extraordinary performance, bitter sweet that it was to be Kumari's last. The length of the shoot - possibly as much as fifteen years - tells on the actress's face and need for body double, but there's no denying the power and pain of her performance.
After Jones's dreadful Warcraft back in 2016, the prospect of more animation from the director filled me with dread. Rogue Trooper, based on a strip from the '2000 AD' comic, was a labour of love for Jones, and it shows. This is a 'Mocap' feature (you know, Avatar, that kind of thing) with a stellar UK cast providing the voices (and the sources of the faces). At the screening I attended, the majority of the audience were thirty something blokes clearly at ease with the gaming culture look of the movie (although I heard one guy on the way out saying that he felt sick throughout...and I know what he means).
Anyway, what's it all about? Well as far as I can ascertain - and there's a lot of content - it's set on a wartorn and environmentally poisoned version of earth, the location for a long term battle between the 'Norts' and the 'Southers' (the latter's rousing battle song plays over the opening and closing credits).
19, a 'genetic infantryman' (Aneurin Barnard) is one of a squad of adapted soldiers developed by the 'Southers', with personalities that can be removed and placed in new bodies on death; the ultimate killing machines (although the fact that the reanimated 'souls' of the GIs (geddit?) sometimes end up in guns or backpacks provides a lot of the movie's often spot on humour).
A betrayal within the ranks decimates 19's regiment, and it's up to him to infiltrate the enemy and discover the mole. This pretty simple setup is occluded with a barrage of characters, situations and noise that will have anyone unfamiliar with this kind of thing (non gamers who don't sit very close to their TVs then) exhausted.
But gradually the mo-cap mist clears and this viewer really started to enjoy themselves. The cast is stuffed with UK comedy regulars; Diane Morgan is a stiff backed colonel, Matt Berry 'plays' one half of a dodgy sales team, looking to sell 19 off, and Hayley Atwell makes a mid movie appearance as a tough vigilante named Venus Bluegenes. This is bold stuff from Jones, a director not afraid to take risks, and I really hope it does well at the box office when released.
Rogue Trooper is also a proudly British production (although with come Canadian money) from its comic book origins to the fact that it was made in a video game studio in Oxfordshire. It's bold, brash, frequently looks amazing, but viewer it takes some getting used to (or maybe that's just me being an old git). Oddly I'm desperate to see it again.
Fero and Mehmood's third documentary, following 2020's Ultraviolence and the following year's Injustice, concentrates on a 1981 story that has, unjustly, largely faded from memory.
The 'Bradford 12', as they came to be known, were a group of British-Asian men who were arrested, imprisoned and tried as 'terrorists' for creating and storing Molotov cocktails intended, as prosecutors alleged, to attack both the local community and the police.
Rebellion frames the arrests and trial within the depressingly familiar story of poor working class families, high unemployment and Government rhetoric on immigrants 'swamping' the country, as well as the rise of the National Front, police brutality (and unlawful killings) and, in 1981, a wave of riots which brought all these things to a head. The national anti 'black' mood is also illustrated by the case of Anwar Ditta, a British-born woman of South Asian heritage whose high-profile fight to be reunited with her three children became a landmark case, where a six year battle with the Home Office finally overturned their intransigent position.
In Bradford, where racist incidents were commonplace, based on information supplied to the Indian community (by the police) about potential skinhead gang attacks, a group of men decided to defend themselves by fashioning makeshift 'molotov cocktails'. The threatened attacks didn't happen, but police raids on several houses led to the discovery of the unused 'bombs' and the arrest of twelve men.
The documentary follows the arrest, committal to prison, and trial of the 'Bradford 12' through interviews and clips from a reconstruction of the court proceedings. In that the whole point of the film hinges on their mistakenly being classified as 'terrorists' for the purposes of conviction, comments from real terrorists like Leila Khaled seem more than a little out of place.
The unanimous acquittal of the 12 was important not only for their personal freedoms but because, in concluding that the men were justified in defending themselves largely because of information received from the police - who lied about the threat levels - it also confirmed that the police were not policing 'without fear or favour'.
Fero and Mehmood's documentary is by its very existence polemical in nature and therefore leaves many questions unanswered. One thing it doesn't state, but is implicit in its message, is that none of the threats faced by those communities 45 years ago have gone away; in fact the hostility they feared has, in a post Brexit world, been mainstreamed. The extensive list of support groups in the end credits suggest that these threats are larger and more insidious than ever.
At some point there will be a definitive onscreen biography of Countess Elizabeth Báthory of Ecsed; 16th Century Hungarian noblewoman, aristocrat and, more infamously, bather in the blood of virgins. God knows there have been a few attempts, from 1971's twin offerings Countess Dracula from Hammer films and Daughters of Darkness by Harry Kümel, and more recently, Bathory: Countess of Blood from 2008, with Anna Friel in the title role.
Anyway Ulrike Ottinger's most recent film is definitely not it; to be blunt, it's difficult to know what this is. Set in a weird fusion of 19th Century and contemporary Vienna, Isabelle Huppert is the Blutgräfin (Blood Countess) Erzsébet Báthory, in town for a kind of family reunion. Aided by her vampire maidservant Hermine (Birgit Minichmayr sporting a Weimar bob), stopping off for an enroute snack courtesy of a young girl's neck, she begins the process of meeting up with her relatives.
Principal among these is nephew Rudi (Thomas Schubert), a strikingly dressed (and among a cast that are all colourfully dressed, that's quite something) vegetarian whose aversion to the red stuff is being worked on with his attendant therapist Theobald (Lars Eidinger).
Following the gathering of the clans are two would be vampire hunters, who have clearly strayed in from the set of Roman Polanski's 1967 horror comedy The Fearless Vampire Killers (clearly an inspiration for this film); Theobastus Bombastus (André Jung) and Nepomuk Afterbite (Marco Lorenzini). While Erzsébet's trail of bloodlust continues, she's also on the search for a book which contains the details of her family's ancestry, keen to stop the records from being destroyed.
Much of the film is devoted to this search, with a distinctly make-it-up-as-you-go-along approach. Clearly eighty-something Ottinger, who is a painter as well as a filmmaker, was much more interested in giving her audience a baroque romp than in following a coherent narrative. After a while the viewer has two options; walk or surrender to the gentle insanity on display.
For the benefit of the rest of this review, reader I stayed and got to witness: lavish ballroom sequences; a feast comprising a centre piece of a body reconstituted from various entrails; magnificent Viennese libraries; a row of gentlemen, seated, shaved and throats slit (mostly offscreen) as one of the banquet courses; a CGI bat with the sensibility of Lassie; oh and Conchita Wurst.
Yes that Conchita Wurst, Austrian Eurovision winner and drag queen who gets to belt out their hit 2014 hit 'Rise Like a Phoenix' probably for no other reason that they happened to be available. Unfortunately this rendition becomes the film's highlight; in its near two hour running time it's the closest The Blood Countess comes to being, if you'll pardon the phrase, full blooded.
I fully accept that The Blood Countess looks amazing with a rousing Strauss-esque score, but its flat pacing and air of self congratulation make it a chore to sit through. I also get that it's a thinly disguised satire of the Austro-Hungarian power dynasties; but it still has to be watchable. The only saving grace, apart from the production design and costumes by Jorge Jara Guarda (and oh if they could be in a better film), is Huppert as Báthory. From the opening scene, where, dressed in trademark vermillion, she steps off a crimson barge floating in an underground canal, straight into the camera like the Bond villainess we'll never see, to the climax on board the giant Wiener Riesenrad ferris wheel, the radiant actor lights up the screen every time she's on. Sadly it's just not enough.
It's 1969 and entrepreneur Rupert Murdoch, following his acquisition of the News of the World, has just bought the struggling broadsheet The Sun from the Mirror Group, a paper with a very limited circulation. People think him bonkers, but he has an idea; to relaunch the paper to an audience who fall between other newspapers - and this is at a time when daily papers are bought by a significant percentage of the UK - and provide something that the working person would want to buy regularly. He also wants 'the establishment' to see him as a major player, something he has, to date, been unable to achieve.
To make this happen, Murdoch makes an offer that can't be refused to Larry Lamb, a brash northerner who at the time was editing The Manchester Daily Mail. Lamb accepts, packs up his family and moves down south, pitching to a number of fellow writers and sub editors to join him.
This is the jumping off point for Danny Boyle's latest movie, which charts The Sun's meteoric rise in popularity under Lamb's control, choosing a populist approach to content and daring to take the paper to places that other titles avoided.
A ferocious Jack O'Connell plays Lamb to Guy Pearce's Murdoch, and much of the film is devoted to the shifting relationship of the pair, with the editor giving the people what they want, no matter how salacious, and the owner tolerating, but never embracing his protege's approach.
Adapted by James Graham from his own 2017 stage play of the same name, Ink's cast of characters mixes the fictitious with the real; chief among these is the excellent Claire Foy as Jules Davies, a plain speaking amalgamation of several strong women who worked on the paper at this time, advancing the female angle of the daily while competing with the hard talking, tough speaking male staff.
Boyle's movie, while remaining faithful to the play, nevertheless manages to open out the action into the printing presses and rainy streets of London; the film begins and ends in elite hangout Rules, the oldest restaurant in London, bookended with two scenes that take place just over ten years apart. The expense account living enjoyed by the pair, and indeed the staff of The Sun, locks the journalists and executives in a golden handshake in which they must tolerate, if not like, the increased excesses of the newspaper; a real work hard, play hard environment.
It also covers the most horrendous (real life) incident in Lamb's tenure: the mistaken identity kidnap (and eventual murder) of Muriel McKay (Lucy Russell), wife of Murdoch executive Alick McKay (Jonathan Hyde). The kidnappers, who wanted to extort a ransom, thought they'd taken Murdoch's wife, and the paper unwisely decided to publicise the incident as it played out. McKay's end (her body was never found) demonstrates the line between responsibility and exploitation, one which sadly didn't hurt The Sun's circulation.
The film closes with the decision which changes The Sun's fortunes forever (and outlasts Lamb and his successor Kelvin Mackenzie, shown waiting in the wings); to feature 20-year-old Stephanie Rahn as its first 'Page 3' girl. Boyle pivots off this scene to a filmed montage which suggests that the paper presaged the slide into populism, embracing pugilist politicians, Facebook, Farage, Musk and Trump. It's a lofty claim and one I didn't totally buy into; indeed I question whether the film would have existed at all if it weren't for the inspiration of the stage play.
Ink is well acted, with the stylish flourishes (and anachronistic soundtrack) which are pure Danny Boyle. See it for O'Connell's taught, driven Lamb and its recreation of a lost time, even though ultimately the film might not equal the sum of its admittedly involving parts.
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