The “Emperor of the Night”, as he has been grandly called,1 the Marquis d’Hervey de Saint-Denys was the great pioneer of “lucid dreaming”: to be aware, while you are fully asleep, that you are dreamin

ONE OF THE MOST GRIMLY FUNNY POEMS OF the past century is Philip Larkin’s “This Be the Verse,” with its opening salvo about how our parents invariably mess us up. Larkin used a saltier word for “mess,

IN AN EARLY SCENE IN LYNNE Ramsay’s brutal, beautiful Die My Love, we see Jennifer Lawrence crawling through a sunny, grassy field on all fours, low to the ground like a sultry panther, as we hear a b

MASAKI KOBAYASHI’S HUGELY INFLUENTIAL JAPANESE HORROR

Dir Dean Puckett, UK 2025 On digital platforms Folk horror has been a thing for a long time, but it’s an over-used term these days. In film terms it appears to mean something heavily influenced by Wit

Liquid drips through the walls. Black mould creeps around the windows towards my bed. I hear strangers’ voices outside my door and screaming from downstairs. The electric shower is stuck at scalding t