Surgeons of Horror

26/09/2025

Beauty in the Bleak: Adorable Humans Pulls Humanity Inside-Out
"Collectively, Adorable Humans doesn’t just tell stories; it gnaws at your sanity. It’s an anthology of darkness, human frailty, and twisted morality, each segment a scalpel dissecting the uncomfortable truths of life, love, and the innate horror of being human. This isn’t polite horror. It’s not even Scandinavian noir in a friendly way. It’s pure, cold, dazzlingly executed dread. Beautifully shot, meticulously scored, and deeply, disturbingly Danish."
Saul Muerte
Adorable Humans will be screening as part of the Dark Nights Film Fest on Sunday 12th Oct at 5.15pm at Ritz.

26/09/2025

Beauty in the Bleak: Adorable Humans Pulls Humanity Inside-Out
"Collectively, Adorable Humans doesn’t just tell stories; it gnaws at your sanity. It’s an anthology of darkness, human frailty, and twisted morality, each segment a scalpel dissecting the uncomfortable truths of life, love, and the innate horror of being human. This isn’t polite horror. It’s not even Scandinavian noir in a friendly way. It’s pure, cold, dazzlingly executed dread. Beautifully shot, meticulously scored, and deeply, disturbingly Danish."
Saul Muerte
Adorable Humans will be screening as part of the Dark Nights Film Fest on Sunday 12th Oct at 5.15pm at Ritz.

Forget bedtime stories. Forget the saccharine sugarcoating of fairy tales. Adorable Humans is Hans Christian Andersen after a month-long bender in a Copenhagen back alley, the ice of the north gnaw…

26/09/2025

Shivers (1975) – Cronenberg’s Parasites of Paranoia
"Shivers hasn’t lost its bite. It’s grim, it’s uncomfortable, and it’s as relevant as ever in a world still haunted by viral outbreaks and communal fear. Cronenberg reminds us that the real horror doesn’t just come from outside—it festers within, waiting patiently to consume us all, one by one."
Saul Muerte

Being terrified is just the beginning! Fifty years on, David Cronenberg’s Shivers still crawls under the skin with its unnerving mix of clinical detachment and raw, bodily horror. Long before he be…

26/09/2025

Dancing with Demons: SUN Burns Toxic Masculinity Alive in the Neon Abyss
"SUN is cinema as possession. A film that doesn’t want to be watched so much as endured, swallowed, vomited back up in chunks of neon and bile. It’s beautiful, it’s punishing, and it leaves you trembling in the realization that sometimes the monsters we fear aren’t lurking in the alleys of New York — they’re standing right behind our own eyes, grinning, waiting for the music to start."
Saul Muerte
SUN will screen as part of the Dark Nights Film Fest on Sunday 12th October at 3pm at Ritz.

There’s a point, somewhere around hour three of a sleepless binge on ci******es and neon, when the city stops being a grid of steel and glass and becomes a writhing organism — teeth in the pavement…

22/09/2025

No Finish Line: The Long Walk Turns Minimalism into Masterpiece
"Power is an illusion, but it doesn’t make it not real. And this film makes you feel that every step of the way.
5 stars."
Antony Yee & Chris Dawes

Sometimes when we get caught up reviewing all these films, it’s easy – all too easy – to forget thatas with a painter staring at a blank canvas; a director, when given their brief, is staring at a …

18/09/2025

Blood, Backpackers, and Blunt Force: Revisiting Eli Roth’s Hostel 20 Years On
"Whether you see it as a gleeful slice of splatter cinema or an exercise in excess without payoff, Hostel is pure Eli Roth. And with him, that’s always been either the best thing or the worst thing about the movie."
Saul Muerte

When Hostel arrived in 2005, Eli Roth had already made a name for himself as a provocateur with Cabin Fever (2002) — a filmmaker whose gleeful embrace of gore and shock was as divisive as it was de…

15/09/2025

Christensen Sharpens His Blade with Night of the Reaper
"Night of the Reaper is less about transcending the slasher than about testing its elasticity—stretching a well-worn form to see what new resonances might emerge."
Saul Muerte
Streaming on Shudder Fri 19th Sep

Brandon Christensen’s Night of the Reaper wears its genre lineage proudly, a film whose scaffolding is unmistakably indebted to the slasher cycle of the late 1970s and early ’80s. Yet what distingu…

11/09/2025

Movie Review: The Conjuring - Last Rites
"If you came looking for terror, you may leave unsatisfied. But if you came looking for a farewell—an elegy for the haunted hearts who dared to investigate the impossible—then The Conjuring: Last Rites offers exactly that. A requiem, not for the dead, but for a love that kept the darkness at bay."
Saul Muerte

There’s a line I keep coming back to when watching The Conjuring: Last Rites: “The case that ended it all.” Not just for Ed and Lorraine Warren, whose final chapter this is meant to be, but for the…

10/09/2025

Phantom of the Opera A Century in the Shadows
Host Saul Muerte celebrates the centenary of Phantom of the Opera (1925) and looks back at this classic feature starring Lon Chaney. This film would mark a significant point in cellular history and the art of horror on screen.

Host Saul Muerte celebrates the centenary of Phantom of the Opera (1925) and looks back at this classic feature starring Lon Chaney. This film would mark a s...

10/09/2025

Closing Reflections: A Phantom That Will Never Die
The Phantom of the Opera is more than a film. It is a mirror held up to the darkest corners of the soul, reflecting back our own longings and shadows. And in that reflection, he lives on—not just in reels of nitrate or on stage under chandelier light—but in the very idea of horror as poetry, as tragedy, as truth.
Saul Muerte

Even after a century in the shadows, The Phantom of the Opera (1925) remains an indelible force—its mask both a symbol of horror and heartbreak, its underground lair a stage for primal emotions too…

10/09/2025

Embrace the Darkness: Dark Nights Film Fest Vol. 2
"Dark Nights is where the monsters come to play.
Forget safe cinema. Forget the plush multiplex glow. The Ritz is where the shadows come alive, and the screen bites back.

Dark Nights Film Fest Vol. 2 — October 9–12, Ritz Cinemas, Randwick.
Bring your nerves, bring your nightmares, and leave your soul at the door.

Saul Muerte

The shadows are calling again. The screen is no longer a safe window to peer through but a chasm, hungry and alive, waiting to swallow you whole. Strap in, Sydney — Dark Nights Film Fest Vol. 2 has…

10/09/2025

Afterlife of the Phantom: Cultural Echoes and Modern Resurrection
"He lives on—in sound and silence, in theatre and film, in tragedy and parody. He is deathless because he was never just a man. He is myth. He is mask. He is memory."
Saul Muerte

Few cinematic figures have endured quite like the Phantom. Rising from the shadows of a silent-era soundstage, Lon Chaney’s masked outsider has taken on a life well beyond the flicker of nitrate fi…