Prano Bailey-Bond’s psychological horror “Censor,” which opens Sundance’s Midnight section Thursday, is a twisted, bloody love letter to the low-budget horror films of the 1980s. Variety spoke to the young British helmer, who was recently named as one of Variety’s “10 Directors to Watch.”
In “Censor,” a young woman, Enid, is seen at work as a film censor in Britain in the 1980s, a time when the growing popularity of VHS players had led to a boom in cheaply made horror films, which soon acquired the nickname “video nasties” in the tabloid press. After a gruesome killing, which the press claims was inspired by a horror film, Enid finds herself in the eye of a media storm, as she had passed the film for distribution.
Bailey-Bond places the media’s “hysterical reaction” to these “video nasties” against the backdrop of Margaret Thatcher’s Britain, a time of social and political strife.
In “Censor,” a young woman, Enid, is seen at work as a film censor in Britain in the 1980s, a time when the growing popularity of VHS players had led to a boom in cheaply made horror films, which soon acquired the nickname “video nasties” in the tabloid press. After a gruesome killing, which the press claims was inspired by a horror film, Enid finds herself in the eye of a media storm, as she had passed the film for distribution.
Bailey-Bond places the media’s “hysterical reaction” to these “video nasties” against the backdrop of Margaret Thatcher’s Britain, a time of social and political strife.
- 1/28/2021
- by Leo Barraclough
- Variety Film + TV
Around halfway through “Saint Maud,” writer-director Rose Glass constructs a cinematic wince moment for the ages, involving nails, bare feet and a young woman with a Christ complex far too big for her own snappable body. “Never waste your pain,” she says, and this short, sharp needle-jab of a horror parable from bleakest Britain takes the same advice. Glass is sparing with her shocks, but knows how to make them count, like sudden voltage surges in the fritzed, volatile machinery of her narrative, each one leaving the protagonist a little more anxiously damaged than before. A meek, devoutly Christian palliative nurse, with an open wound of a past and what she believes is a higher calling for the future, Maud is like Carrie White and her mother Margaret rolled into one unholy holy terror; as played with brilliant, blood-freezing intensity by Morfydd Clark, she’s a genre anti-heroine to cherish,...
- 9/9/2019
- by Guy Lodge
- Variety Film + TV
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