Tag: Gavin Baddeley

The last few Christmases have seen the Krampus making his presence felt far beyond his snowy Alpine homelands. For the benefit of the uninitiated, the Krampus is a hairy, horned devil who carries a sack and a switch. He accompanies Saint Nicholas on his Yuletide rounds in early December, and while Nicholas gives gifts to good children, Krampus whips the naughty ones, and pops the really bad little boys and girls in his sack to take away.

Every November, our resident horror fanatic Gavin Baddeley makes an annual pilgrimage to Aberystwyth on the Welsh coast to attend the Abertoir Festival. While not the biggest or longest established of the UK’s horror festivals, Gavin assures us that it’s among the best. It features theatre performances, themed club nights, site visits, talks, live music and more. But the backbone of the six day event remains the film screenings, with 26 horror movies shown in 2017, including vintage classics and exclusive premiers of the best forthcoming features. We asked Gavin to pick out a few of the most bizarre, scary and entertaining upcoming horror films he’d seen there, for horror fans to look out for on cinema screens, in the DVD racks, and on streaming services in the coming months…

It’s time for Vikings fans, devotees of the Dark Age era and history buffs to break out the battleaxes and launch the longships, as, starting on the 20th of February, the historic English city of York will be playing host to the 33rd annual Jorvik Viking Festival. The largest event of its kind in Europe, the Jorvik Festival attracts re-enactors, experts and traders from all over the world. Jorvik is the Norse name for York, back when it was the Viking capital of England. It’s also the name of the interactive museum and archeological attraction who run the festival.

For many of us, Christmas is all about spending time with family. Being more realistic, it’s often more about sitting around the TV with people we seldom see. So, what do you do if you want to watch something dark and spooky, but everyone else insists on something seasonal? We asked our resident horror expert Gavin Baddeley if there was anything that ticked both boxes, and he assured us that there was. Take it away Gavin…

Ancient Greece is most often associated with its intellectual achievements – in fields like philosophy, mathematics, and politics – leading many to regard it as the bedrock of Western civilisation. But a recent archaeological discovery has served as a grim reminder that the Ancient Greeks had a sinister side.

Horror fans seldom greet the news of yet another Hollywood remake with much enthusiasm. It usually involves a well-loved classic being cynically resurrected as a cash-in. But if the team behind the revival are sufficiently interesting, or the film in question adequately iconic, then its possible to make exceptions.

The northern English city of Manchester is most often associated with soccer and perhaps its vibrant indie music scene. Yet this thriving metropolis also has much to offer the more darkly inclined.

The Secret Past of TV’s Hottest New Devil

From the bloodsucking pin-ups in Buffy and True Blood, to the prime time serial killers Dexter and Hannibal, the heroes of TV’s best shows just seem to get darker and darker. But can you get any darker than the Devil himself, titular anti-hero of the hot new series Lucifer?… Not everybody’s happy, with conservative Christian groups calling for the show to be banned, the right-wing pressure group One Million Moms, raging that it ‘will glorify Satan as a caring, likeable person in human flesh.’

Ghost stories have long been traditionally associated with Christmas, and a good spinechiller can prove a welcome spooky antidote to the saccharine sentimentality of the season. Anyone likely to be in the Liverpool area over the next few weeks, who fancies an evening of ghosts and goosebumps, should check out The Haunting of Hill House, the new production at the city’s Playhouse Theatre. It comes with an impressive pedigree, adapted from a 1959 novel by America’s queen of psychological horror Shirley Jackson, staged in association with the legendary Gothic film studio Hammer.

Alchemy’s resident horror fiend Gavin Baddeley attends a lot of horror festivals, but he reckons the Welsh event, Abertoir, is among the best. So we asked him to report back on the best new fear flicks that previewed at 2015’s six day Aberystwyth marathon of the macabre…