We Bury the Dead review – Daisy Ridley tackles the undead in solid zombie twist

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Star Wars alum gives an impressively modest performance in this slightly smarter-than-average survival tale Unlike some other less resilient horror subgenres, the zombie movie is, fittingly, never going to really die. Neither will film-makers attempting to add their own twist, understandable given how repetitive the die, wake up, lumber, bite and repeat formula has become. Australian director Zak Hilditch’s attempt, the rather buried We Bury the Dead, is therefore not quite as striking as it might have seemed a decade and change ago. Using words such as “contemplative” and “mournful” to describe a film that includes its fair share of gnarly head-smashing has become something of a cliche, so much so that last month’s meta-comedy Anaconda reboot had its characters joke that these days, even a film about a giant snake needs “intergenerational trauma” to work. But Hilditch mercifully avoids drowning his film in drab self-seriousness. Yes, it’s a zombie survival thriller that’s also abo...
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The Exorcist review – Friedkin’s head-swivelling horror is still diabolically inspired

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The 50th anniversary extended director’s cut of the 1973 tale of teenage possession still shocks

William Friedkin’s deadly serious contemporary horror, adapted for the screen from the bestseller by novelist William Peter Blatty, is back now in cinemas for its 50-year anniversary in the extended director’s cut. This is the film that whispered its evil into the ears of US audiences traumatised by political and generational upheaval. It is also the great ancestor of the entire horror genre: a 132-minute jump scare – with horribly malign slow sections – taking place in upper-middle class America rather than some exotic central European locale. (I have in the past suggested that it brought supernatural fear into the American suburbs; well, I should admit that Georgetown in DC is hardly a suburb, in fact the point is that it is very near the political centre of the free world.)

Ellen Burstyn plays movie actor Chris MacNeil, a single mother ordinarily resident in California but currently renting a handsome townhouse in Washington as she shoots a film called Crash Course; she is playing a liberal academic at odds with the student body who are violently possessed with revolutionary ideas. Her director is a louche and boozy Brit called Burke Dennings, whose persona is maybe inspired a bit by Ken Russell, who is played by veteran Irish stage actor Jack MacGowran and whose death shortly after shooting helped create the “cursed film” aura that surrounds The Exorcist.

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