21st Century Frights: (Part 11) August-december 2012

Come on. Hurry up and sit down.

- MJ Simpson

We’ve got a lot to get through. There were a shelf busting 44 British horror features released in the back-end of 2012, so while that year did not signal the end of civilisation after all, it does require us to crack straight on with this article.

Directed by Neil Jones and produced by Stuart Brennan, The Reverend is an odd vampire movie with a heavyweight cast that includes Doug Bradley, Emily Booth, Shane Richie, Giovanni Lombardo Radice and Rutger Hauer – who mumbles his way through a prologue where he and Radice are (sort of) God and Satan. Brennan is a vicar assigned to a parish which is either a quaint Welsh village or an inner city sink estate. After Marcia Do Valles sinks her fangs into him, the Rev becomes a bloodsucker, but a righteous one who seeks only to munch down on wrongdoers. Bouffis a prostitute who runs a local film club in a room above a pub and Richie is surprisingly good in a genuinely scary turn as her sadistic pimp.

Haemovores were also the focus of two feature-length edits of web/cable serials this year. Jason Davitt’s Vampires: Brighter in Darkness is a sexy LGBT fantasy apparently set in a world where no-one owns a shirt, which could be easily mistaken for a David DeCoteau picture were it not for the accents. A sequel was recently released. Chris Stone’s Blood and Bone China is a low-budget but stylish Victorian gothic saga set around my old stomping ground of Stoke-on-Trent. There was also a vampire in Night is Day, a Scottish web-serial re-edit, although the main focus of this action/ sci-fi/horror tale is a superhero. And no, it’s not Supergran. An ancient demonic creature emerges and starts laying waste to everything in sight without even pausing for a deep-fried Mars bar. Only Scotland’s lightning-powered hero and his bloodsucker sidekick can defeat it. Or something.