BUILT ON A PREMISE as concise as its title, claustrophobic psychological horror Cube did a whole lot with very little. It introduced us to a group of strangers who wake to find themselves trapped in their own cube-shaped prisons. Before they can figure out who has caged them and why, their mystery cubes start fighting back, punishing each incorrect escape attempt with vicious booby traps and inventive and frequently bloody kills.
27 years later, the afterlife of director Vincenzo Natali's debut remains as alluring as ever. Spawning two direct sequels and a Japanese remake, its fingerprints can be found all over the gore-flecked "consequence horrors" of the early noughties. In hindsight, it feels like Cube sliced so that films like James Wan's Saw franchise could dice - a pretty apt and deserving legacy for a movie that was so tricky to make it nearly killed its director.
"What really excited me about the idea for Cube was that I felt like I hadn't seen it before," Natali tells SFX, casting his mind back to when he first stumbled upon the idea as a movie-bingeing film student at the Canadian Film Centre. Inspired by minimalist classics like Alfred Hitchcock's Lifeboat and Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker, Natali's initial thought process led him into surreal territory before he landed on the lean simplicity that made Cube a cult hit.
This story is from the March 2024 edition of SFX UK.
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This story is from the March 2024 edition of SFX UK.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 9,000+ magazines and newspapers.
Already a subscriber? Sign In
Making Alien - Jaws in Space - Forty-five years on from its original release, Alien continues to terrify. We dissect what arguably remains the most chilling instalment in the saga
The seven-strong crew of the commercial mining spacecraft the Nostromo seal their fate after reluctantly responding to a mysterious distress signal on a hostile planet. Here, a face-hugging alien from a derelict ship impregnates and later kills executive officer Kane (John Hurt) after its offspring is birthed onboard. After being unleashed, the fearsome newborn with acid for blood proceeds to dispatch the remainder of the crew.Ridley Scott's much more convoluted prequels have yet to reveal how the knowledge that led to this initial interception was acquired. However, the premise of the original Alien is perfect in its uncomplicated purity.
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