At first glance, audiences could make some unflattering assumptions about director Gabriel Carrer’s latest outing IN THE HOUSE OF FLIES: Yet another indie movie about pretty people tied up in basements and hideously tortured by some sadistic lunatic with sinister motives. This is a popular well to draw from because it’s inexpensive to shoot, and because despite all the voices out there condemning “torture porn” as a genre, audiences seem to continue to support it. Fortunately these assumptions about IN THE HOUSE OF FLIES would be quite mistaken. There is something much more sophisticated going on in this film than its trappings would suggest.

Stop us if you’ve heard this one before: Young director (usually European) has an audacious debut feature that has fans and critics buzzing. Said director is then tempted into working with a big Hollywood studio, and once he exhibits the same risky daring for which he was presumably hired, the studio’s timid money men bow to test screenings and drain the product until it’s a safe, bland porridge. Such was the case with Clive Barker, whose second film NIGHTBREED (1990) was hobbled by backers Morgan Creek and Fox.

There have been many—probably way too many—movies made about terrible events within and surrounding the house at 112 Ocean Avenue in Amityville, New York, most purporting to be based to some degree or another on fact. It can be unequivocally stated that MY AMITYVILLE HORROR is the most true-to-life film to deal with the phenomenon, and pretty much as unequivocally stated that it’s the best of them too.

If you’ve read the manga by UZUMAKI and TOMIE’s Junji Ito that GYO is based on, it’s extra fun to see the movie with friends and/or a big audience unsuspecting of the batpoop-crazy experience they’re about to have. If you haven’t, well…prepare for a truly bizarre ride.

While the vast majority of fictional characters are on some sort of path to discovery, there certainly seems to be a lot more searching these days. From the grand cosmic queries of PROMETHEUS to the more personal probing of this summer’s horror offerings RED LIGHTS and THE AWAKENING, it seems the world’s frustration with the balance of science and spirituality, and our own searches within them, are becoming externalized more frequently.

DEAD BITE belongs to a very small sub-subset of Asian horror in which rock/pop bands play themselves and fight zombies. If you liked WILD ZERO, chances are you’ll enjoy this one too.

A gorgeous, haunting exploration of youthful imagination, THE CAPTURED BIRD transports viewers back in time to their own early excavations of the dark. The eleven-minute short is the freshman outing from genre publishing icon Jovanka Vuckovic, who reportedly turned to her horror heroes for guidance at the project’s outset. In the end, just as she proved in ZOMBIES! AN ILLUSTRATED HISTORY OF THE UNDEAD and with how she evolved Canada’s Rue Morgue magazine from fan rag to one of the most distinct voices in genre periodicals, THE CAPTURED BIRD is clearly the product of Vuckocic’s own vision. The results are stunning.