Surgeons of Horror

16/12/2025

Retrospective: Wolfblood (1925)
Celebrating 100 years of Wolf Blood — a film remembered more for what it promised than what it delivered.
Released in an era defined by Nosferatu and The Phantom of the Opera, this early attempt at lycanthropy never embraces horror, never unleashes a monster, and never finds its voice. A footnote in the genre’s evolution rather than a foundational text.

One hundred years on, Wolf Blood remains less a horror film than a cinematic curiosity—an early brush with werewolf mythology that never commits to being a werewolf film, a thriller without thrills…

16/12/2025

Beast of War (2025) Sharks, Sweat, and Survival
Roache-Turner trades zombies for sharks in Beast of War — a WWII survival film where masculinity erodes under hunger, heat, and fear.
It’s gritty, funny in all the wrong moments, and impressively crafted on a tight budget. Survival is the only victory here.

Kiah Roache-Turner has never been subtle. From the splatter-punk bravado of Wyrmwood to the steel-jawed siege mentality of Nekrotronic and Wyrmwood: Apocalypse, his films have been fueled by testos…

14/12/2025

Movie Review: Shelby Oaks
There’s genuine love for horror baked into Shelby Oaks, but love without discipline isn’t enough. The film’s shifting formats and borrowed ideas smother its tension, turning a promising mystery into a cluttered, frustrating watch.

Shelby Oaks arrives carrying the weight of expectation that inevitably accompanies a passion project years in the making. Directed by Chris Stuckmann, the film positions itself at the crossroads of…

06/12/2025

So, i managed to watch 251 out of 284 films from my annual retrospective list. Not too bad.
Top 12 films
12. American Psycho
11. The Addiction
10. Vampire Hunter D
9. Phantom of the Opera
8. The Descent
7. Re-Animator
6. The Rocky Horror Picture Show
5. Bride of Frankenstein
4. Shadow of a Vampire
3. Jaws
2. Repulsion
1. Les Diaboliques

A list of 284 films compiled on Letterboxd, including The Case of the Murder of Tariel Mklavadze (1925), The Phantom of the Opera (1925), Wolf Blood (1925), Bride of Frankenstein (1935) and Mark of the Vampire (1935).

27/11/2025

🎄🔪 GIVEAWAY ALERT – READY FOR A SILENT NIGHT… A DEADLY NIGHT? 🔪🎄
📅 Wednesday, 10 December
🕡 6:30pm
📍 Event Cinemas George Street
🎁 TO ENTER:
Tell us in the comments (or DM):
“What’s the naughtiest thing you’ve done that would get you on Santa’s bad list?”
Entries close Sun 30th Nov 8am*
Open to Sydney residents only

25/11/2025

This film starts like a quirky meet-cute… and ends in absolute madness. Good Boy is a bold reminder that sometimes the biggest danger is ignoring your instincts.

In the recent wave of minimalist horror — the creeping, patient, anti-spectacle cinema of Skinamarink, In a Violent Nature, The Outwaters, and When Evil Lurks’ quietest passages — fear is less a co…

24/11/2025

SALO, or the 120 Days of S***m is not a film you revisit lightly. Pasolini transforms cruelty into political metaphor, revealing the darkest machinations of authoritarian power. Disturbing, confrontational, and undeniably important.

There are films you watch.There are films you endure.And then there is Salò: Pier Paolo Pasolini’s final cinematic scream, released weeks after he was murdered on an Ostia beach, his body left grot…

15/11/2025

Del Toro’s long-awaited Frankenstein arrives dripping with atmosphere and visual splendour.
Yet for all its beauty, the film’s deviations from Shelley’s stark, macabre heart leave it struggling to find emotional focus.

Still, the creature’s awakening is a moment of pure cinema — and proof that del Toro remains one of our great myth-makers.

Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein arrives with the inevitability of myth. Few contemporary filmmakers are as attuned to the poetry of monsters, and fewer still have built an oeuvre so devoted to th…

14/11/2025

Chains of Creation: Stuart Gordon’s Castle Freak and the Prison of the Gothic

Before Castle Freak was a cult curiosity buried in the Full Moon archives, it was the sound of a visionary filmmaker fighting against his own chains.

Stuart Gordon’s 1995 collaboration with Charles Band trades the neon madness of Re-Animator for cold, European dread — a tale of guilt, repression, and the monstrous within. Starring Jeffrey Combs and Barbara Crampton, the film may be confined by its low budget, but Gordon finds poetry in decay.

Our 30th anniversary retrospective unpacks this macabre hybrid of Gothic tragedy and B-movie grit — and how Castle Freak became one of Gordon’s most quietly personal horrors.

Read now on Surgeons of Horror🩸

By the mid-1990s, Castle Freak found Stuart Gordon at a fascinating crossroads — caught between the transgressive brilliance of his early H.P. Lovecraft adaptations (Re-Animator, From Beyond) and t…

13/11/2025

“You can’t cheat death twice.”

Colin Krawchuk’s follow-up to his 2023 cult horror revisits the blood-splattered stage of his supernatural trickster, this time pitting him against teen magician Max in a Halloween showdown of illusion and survival.

The film boasts a handful of inspired kills and a gritty lead performance that adds heart to the spectacle, but much of the magic fades under the weight of repetition and unnecessary exposition. The Jester 2 is entertaining in flashes but never quite conjures the mystery that made its masked menace memorable.

A bloody encore that can’t quite pull the rabbit from the hat.

“You can’t cheat death twice.” The tagline for The Jester 2 knowingly toys with the very predicament its creators find themselves in: how do you resurrect a concept that, while promising, never qui…

13/11/2025

50 Years of Madness in the Outback.
Long before Wolf Creek or The Nightingale, there was Inn of the Damned — Terry Bourke’s strange, sunburnt fusion of gothic horror and the Australian western.
Forgotten by many but foundational to our national horror identity, it’s a fever dream of vengeance, isolation, and colonial ghosts that refuse to die.
Read our 50th anniversary retrospective on how Bourke’s haunting vision helped shape the birth of Australian genre cinema.

In the barren, wind-bitten wilds of colonial Australia, Inn of the Damned (1975) found horror in isolation. Long before “Ozploitation” became a term of critical affection, Terry Bourke’s strange hy…

12/11/2025

When faith turns to fear, there’s no exorcising the past. Daniel J. Phillips’ Diabolic (2025) leans into Australian folk horror traditions with striking visuals and a chilling performance from Elizabeth Cullen — but its predictable turns and sluggish pacing stop it from reaching its infernal potential.
🎥 In cinemas nationwide from November 20 via Monster Pictures.

Australian genre cinema has been pushing at the boundaries of horror for over a decade now—restless, ambitious, and eager to prove that its terrors can hold their own on the world stage. Daniel J. …