John Shelton

Even if you’ve read a lot of Stephen King, it’s still quite likely that you haven’t read Thinner. Hell, out of the books King wrote under his Richard Bachman pseudonym, Thinner’s probably the last one you’d reach for. The only reason the minor-est of minor Stephen King novels was turned into a movie was due to the Firestarter Accords of 1983, which mandate that anything Stephen King writes must be adapted for the screen. Sometime around the mid-2030s scientists project that we’ll reach the Stephen King Singularity and his entire canon will have been filmed.

Bone Tomahawk is one of those movies where the elevator pitch is blindingly obvious: The Searchers meets Cannibal Holocaust. Not the most obvious mash-up, but novelist turned first-time writer-director S. Craig Zahler ably delivers a surprisingly meditative Western that takes a hard left into Horror without running into the ditch.

eXistenZ is maybe the David Cronenberg-iest movie David Cronenberg has ever made. Sure, there’s the body horror - quivering mounds of flesh, spinal cords being penetrated, a bio-matter gun that fires human teeth - but underneath all the goo, eXistenZ is a psychological thriller that just happens to play out in a world of pure dream logic.

Imagine showing a vampire movie to someone who has no pre-existing knowledge of vampires. They would probably be baffled trying to piece together all the rules that usually need no explanation. Sunlight burns them? They have to drink the blood of the living to survive? They can be hurt by a specific geometric shape? The concept of “vampire” is so familiar to anyone who has seen a movie, cartoon or Halloween costume in the last 50 years, that we don’t need an extended scene of Dr. Van Expositioning laying out the rules.