FrightFest — A–Z of films

A totally idiosyncratic creation, something that deserves to be relished for its bravado refusal to play by the rules.

The tiger here is no CG or animatronic confection, but a living, breathing predator (or, more exactly, three of them playing one), brought into proximity with the actors through seamless compositing.

It boils down to an exercise in horror and endurance. It's rare you see a film which will elicit such a guttural reaction from its audience

Far too straight-laced and uptight to appeal to fans of either genre.

It's pretty torturous stuff.

It's a shame that it ends up running round the corridors instead of making something of the various opportunities it has to throw in twists or add depth to its storyline.

Squarely aimed at a student demographic, the entire affair plays out like an episode of Scooby Doo on acid with the added fuel of frequent sex.

On one level the film is pretty simple, though nicely put together - but what makes it more interesting are its moral and philosophical twists and turns.

A joyous genre mash-up of John Hughes-style adolescent anxieties and drill-bit depravities (call it 'torture prom'), all married in McLeavy's wonderfully unhinged turn as a pretty-in-pink princess of perversion.

If this is what the British director can achieve on a shoestring, one can only look forward to what a bigger budget may bring with monster expectation.

For much of its runtime, Outcast may be the best British horror film since The Descent.

Everything from the appearance of the creatures to the often surprisingly visceral gore is shot in quite a straightforward way, which somehow gets under your skin.

For the first half an hour, the tension bubbles along nicely... but the further into the runtime we ride, the more the cliches stack up.

This isn't just blood and guts mayhem; this is about the mental repercussions of bodily violence.

The whole point of A Serbian Film is to sicken and offend the viewer.

Hooper infects characters and viewers alike with the thrill of a madness from which there can be no real escape.

We Are What We Are deploys some well-defined horror tropes to dramatise much broader humanistic concerns about survival, continuity and love.