The Juno writer has met a backlash with her Megan Fox and Amanda Seyfried-starring teen horror Jennifer’s Body. “I gotta say, I felt plain on that set,” she admits

Diablo Cody, legs tucked daintily beneath her on the sofa in a hotel facing the Pacific Ocean, and clutching a cup of coffee, is talking about how celebrity makes some people crazy and mean.

“There are some people out there who think that I’m repulsive, that I’m not even human. This guy said, if he had a choice between having sex with me and cutting his dick off, then he’d cut his own dick off. And I was like, first of all I think you’re lying. But second, if he is telling the truth, then that says something pretty profound … about him. I think he was exaggerating, but it’s so odd you’d ever feel the need to write such a thing in a public forum. And if he were to meet me, even for a few moments,” the one-time stripper turned screenwriter adds in a sweeter, more conciliatory tone, “perhaps he could be persuaded not to lop off his Johnson.”

In a world where men now seem ready to lop off their own Johnsons rather than have sex, Cody’s violent new high school sex comedy horror movie, Jennifer’s Body, should fit in nicely. My mind reels back to the first–wave feminism of the 70s, thinking, wasn’t lopping off Johnsons considered mere women’s work back then? Progress takes many strange forms, apparently.

‘This guy said, if he had a choice between having sex with me and cutting his dick off, then he’d cut his own dick off’

As does the backlash, which has been building since before her last movie, the indie romcom Juno, won Cody a Best Original Screenplay Academy Award, guaranteeing the enmity of the people she’d outpaced to the top.

“I had been experiencing a backlash on a grass–roots level for a long time,” she says. “First I was a success in my home town, then there was a little backlash there. It happened in stages, with each new level of success. And then when you win an Oscar, it’s like a global backlash. Obviously you can’t expect everyone to like all your work, but it’s always the people who don’t like it that say it the most loudly. But on the other hand, nobody has ever said anything about me that comes anywhere near what I think about myself. None of them has ever approached my level of self–loathing, even my biggest hater!”

If we dwell on the backlash, it’s because it has become bigger news than the new movie itself, which is being reviewed within its carping context, and often unfairly. Not that a mean–spirited, vengeful backlash against a successful, genuinely witty female writer with a high public profile couldn’t have been predicted with numbing accuracy years ago.

Cody almost purrs when I tell her that Jennifer’s Body reminds me in small ways of Terry Zwigoff’s Ghost World. Both are acid–tinged depictions of what happens when two female friends grow up and apart as high school ends and adult reality beckons. Except here one of the friends gets turned into a monstrous succubus and starts eating her way – on a monthly, and Cody affirms, not strictly LUNAR, schedule – through the full gamut of high school boy stereotypes: pierced goth kid, offensive linebacker, wannabe ladies man etc. As played by Megan Fox, several orders of magnitude of icy beauty above the mere mortals around her, Jennifer is the worst type of popular high school girl, fully aware of her newfound beauty and confident enough to brandish it like a weapon against one and all. Her best friend Anita (or “Needy” – one of Cody’s slightly too clever–clever emblematic names) Lesnicki, played by Amanda Seyfried of Big Love, Veronica Mars and Mamma Mia!, has known her since they were three (“Sandbox love never dies,” she notes in voiceover), and acts as her sounding board, agony aunt and punching bag without complaint.

Things change when Jennifer pressures Needy to attend a local show with indie band Low Shoulder, led by Adam Brody of The OC (always more fun to watch when he’s being a dick and a villain). The venue burns down, killing scores of people but the pair escape, with Jennifer taking an ill–advised ride in the band’s makeout mobile. Later that night she shows up at Needy’s house covered in gallons of blood and vomiting horrible oil–black sludge in copious amounts.

Cue the metaphorical version of the female high school experience, some of it obvious, all of it fun: Jennifer the literal maneater – and her monthlies really are murder; the voraciousness of a young women’s newly-discovered sexual/bloodletting appetites and the utter inability of the men around her to quench them. And then there’s the way Needy figures out what’s happened to Jennifer – by feminine intuition! Best plot device ever, it saves a ton of exposition.

‘There’s a dark component to being a teenage girl, because overnight you have this power’

“My high school experience was a lot more like Juno than Jennifer, obviously,” says Cody. “I hung out with a group of pretty inoffensive kids, playing musical instruments, having fun and moving furniture around the neighbourhood.

“But there’s a dark component to being a teenage girl, because overnight you have this power. It was so strange to me. I’d always been … I don’t wanna say this ‘weird kid’ … reading books and so on. Then as a teenager, suddenly guys are paying attention, construction workers are whistling at you. And your mom isn’t letting you out of the house in those shorts. It’s like you’ve mutated and suddenly you have a totally different skill set. That power can corrupt you. For me, I went wild. I couldn’t believe my luck. ‘Oooh, I’m in control now, I can have a boyfriend, I can smoke, I can wear a BRA!’ It was all so exciting. I was born to be a teenager, I’m still ready to be one now, and I’m 31 years old. I was obsessed with being a teenager and I’m still obsessed with teenagers. To me it’s the most heightened bizarre time in a person’s life. It’s like you’re a werewolf or a vampire and always changing. There is something horrible and fascinating about girls going through puberty and adolescence. I don’t know if you’ve seen The Virgin Suicides … I really liked that movie and I remember when I was writing this that I wanted to catch that same strange, ominous feeling that it captures about being a teenager.

“At the time I wrote the movie, I was feeling kinda dark, feeling maybe that I was turning into somebody I didn’t like. I had become really driven, and I realised that I had a chance at a career as a writer, so it brought out this desperation in me, gave me some teeth. Part of me was trying to suppress that instinct and be the kind of laidback down–to–earth midwesterner that I really am. And part of me was like ‘NO! We’re gonna make this happen!’ I was being pulled in two different directions, and it felt like it made sense to write a horror movie.”

You have to love a parallel universe where blonde starlet Amanda Seyfried plays the plain–Jane role, I offer.

“I know, and I really had to fight for Amanda Seyfried’s glasses! I said to them, ‘I don’t think the glasses are going to dim her beauty.’ I gotta say I felt very plain on that set.”

The Shining was voted most frightening horror ever at the start of the week. But new hit chiller Paranormal Activity is being sold as such. Can they both be right? Stuart Heritage invites you to a scary movie smackdown

What’s the scariest film of all time? It’s an age-old debate, and one that many thought could never be solved. After all, fear is such a personal and individual emotion that categorising any one thing as being definitively scarier than anything else seemed like a worthless pursuit. Or at least it did until a couple of people told the world what the scariest films of all time were recently. And now we know.

The scariest film of all time isn’t The Exorcist or Rosemary’s Baby or Don’t Look Now or The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. It isn’t The Wicker Man, unless you’re terrified of weird hair and bad sweaters. And it definitely isn’t any of the Saw movies, for the simple reason that Jigsaw seems like the sort of person who’d quite enjoy a nice game of Sudoku. No, the scariest movie ever made is either Paranormal Activity or The Shining. It’s definitely one of those two.

The Shining has earnt its place because this week it was named as the scariest movie ever in a survey conducted by Totalscifionline.com. Meanwhile, recent American box office sensation Paranormal Activity is in the running because a couple of blogs said that it might be the scariest film of all time about a fortnight ago. But which one is the scariest? It’s impossible to say. The only thing that can decide this once and for all is science. And by “science” I mean “a middling sort of Top Trumps rip-off”. Ready?

Best urban myth about the film

They say that Stanley Kubrick refused to tell Danny Lloyd that he was starring in a horror during the filming of The Shining, which isn’t a very scary fact. They also say that Steven Spielberg convinced himself that his screener DVD of Paranormal Activity was haunted. That isn’t a very scary fact either, but it wins on grounds of outright stupidity.
WINNER: Paranormal Activity.

Influences

Stylistically and thematically, The Shining nods to both Carl Dreyer’s Vampyr and Hansel And Gretel, two stories that have frightened for generations. Meanwhile, Paranormal Activity takes its lead from The Blair Witch Project – a film about some runny-nosed idiots running around a forest and whining a bit.
WINNER: The Shining.

Best parody

Even though it’s brand new, Paranormal Activity already has its fair share of YouTube parodies, the best of which seems to be Paranerdal Activity. But The Shining has Shining, the recut trailer that’s still as sublime as the first time you saw it almost four years ago. WINNER: The Shining.

Best cast pedigree

The Shining: Jack Nicholson from One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest and Shelly Duvall from Annie Hall. Paranormal Activity: Micah Stoat and Katie Featherstone from nothing else at all.
WINNER: The Shining.

Best reaction video

Terrified audience reaction videos are so key to Paranormal Activity’s success that they even make up much of the film’s trailer. Meanwhile, all The Shining can muster is this. The Shining makes toddlers giggle adorably. Fact.
WINNER: Paranormal Activity.

Scariest title

Paranormal Activity has two scary things in it – the word “paranormal” and the word “activity”, which we already know will be of a paranormal nature because of the word that precedes it. Then there’s The Shining. You know what shines? A nice pair of new shoes. Shoes aren’t particularly scary.
WINNER: Paranormal Activity.

Amount of racehorses named after lines from the film

The Shining has Red Rum, obviously, but until someone breeds a horse called Hey, It Looks Like Something’s Bit You, then it draws a big fat zero.
WINNER: The Shining.

So there it is. The Shining is the scariest film ever made. Now let’s hear no more about it.

The Shining was voted most frightening horror ever at the start of the week. But new hit chiller Paranormal Activity is being sold as such. Can they both be right? Stuart Heritage invites you to a scary movie smackdown

What’s the scariest film of all time? It’s an age-old debate, and one that many thought could never be solved. After all, fear is such a personal and individual emotion that categorising any one thing as being definitively scarier than anything else seemed like a worthless pursuit. Or at least it did until a couple of people told the world what the scariest films of all time were recently. And now we know.

The scariest film of all time isn’t The Exorcist or Rosemary’s Baby or Don’t Look Now or The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. It isn’t The Wicker Man, unless you’re terrified of weird hair and bad sweaters. And it definitely isn’t any of the Saw movies, for the simple reason that Jigsaw seems like the sort of person who’d quite enjoy a nice game of Sudoku. No, the scariest movie ever made is either Paranormal Activity or The Shining. It’s definitely one of those two.

The Shining has earnt its place because this week it was named as the scariest movie ever in a survey conducted by Totalscifionline.com. Meanwhile, recent American box office sensation Paranormal Activity is in the running because a couple of blogs said that it might be the scariest film of all time about a fortnight ago. But which one is the scariest? It’s impossible to say. The only thing that can decide this once and for all is science. And by “science” I mean “a middling sort of Top Trumps rip-off”. Ready?

Best urban myth about the film

They say that Stanley Kubrick refused to tell Danny Lloyd that he was starring in a horror during the filming of The Shining, which isn’t a very scary fact. They also say that Steven Spielberg convinced himself that his screener DVD of Paranormal Activity was haunted. That isn’t a very scary fact either, but it wins on grounds of outright stupidity.
WINNER: Paranormal Activity.

Influences

Stylistically and thematically, The Shining nods to both Carl Dreyer’s Vampyr and Hansel And Gretel, two stories that have frightened for generations. Meanwhile, Paranormal Activity takes its lead from The Blair Witch Project – a film about some runny-nosed idiots running around a forest and whining a bit.
WINNER: The Shining.

Best parody

Even though it’s brand new, Paranormal Activity already has its fair share of YouTube parodies, the best of which seems to be Paranerdal Activity. But The Shining has Shining, the recut trailer that’s still as sublime as the first time you saw it almost four years ago. WINNER: The Shining.

Best cast pedigree

The Shining: Jack Nicholson from One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest and Shelly Duvall from Annie Hall. Paranormal Activity: Micah Stoat and Katie Featherstone from nothing else at all.
WINNER: The Shining.

Best reaction video

Terrified audience reaction videos are so key to Paranormal Activity’s success that they even make up much of the film’s trailer. Meanwhile, all The Shining can muster is this. The Shining makes toddlers giggle adorably. Fact.
WINNER: Paranormal Activity.

Scariest title

Paranormal Activity has two scary things in it – the word “paranormal” and the word “activity”, which we already know will be of a paranormal nature because of the word that precedes it. Then there’s The Shining. You know what shines? A nice pair of new shoes. Shoes aren’t particularly scary.
WINNER: Paranormal Activity.

Amount of racehorses named after lines from the film

The Shining has Red Rum, obviously, but until someone breeds a horse called Hey, It Looks Like Something’s Bit You, then it draws a big fat zero.
WINNER: The Shining.

So there it is. The Shining is the scariest film ever made. Now let’s hear no more about it.

The moving 3D adventure turns into one of Pixar’s strongest performers, the Saw series shows its first dip, and fans line up for small-hours premieres of This Is It

The winner
Pixar’s Up remains super-buoyant at the top of the box office, with yet another slim decline – 26% – and cumulative takings of £19.68m. After 17 days on release, the animation is well ahead of Pixar’s previous release WALL-E at the same stage of its run last summer (£13.56m) and modestly ahead of Ratatouille (£17.29m). However, Ratatouille’s 17-day figure included the whole October half-term holiday from 2007, whereas that has only just begun for Up. The film should have an especially rich period between now and Sunday.

Up has already overtaken the lifetime total of Pixar’s worst-performing UK title, Cars (£16.5m), and should soon shoot past Toy Story (£22.3m), WALL-E (£22.9m) and Ratatouille (£24.8m). But it still has a long way to go to challenge Ice Age 3: Dawn of the Dinosaurs’ position as 2009′s biggest animation: that film, from rival studio Twentieth Century Fox, has been pushed back into cinemas for half-term and has now grossed £34.87m.

The rival animation
Offering an alternative to the computer-generated 3D sheen of Up is Wes Anderson’s determinedly lo-fi stop-motion animation Fantastic Mr Fox. Debut takings of £1.52m will be seen as not exactly stellar for a family film based on a recognised property (Roald Dahl’s 1970 story) – but taking all the factors into account, it’s an OK start. In the first place, Anderson has never been mega-box office, and has been on a declining revenue curve since his third movie, 2001′s The Royal Tenenbaums: that film, Life Aquatic and Darjeeling Limited opened with £700,000, £455,000 and £435,000, respectively. Secondly, takings for animations outside Disney/Pixar, DreamWorks and Fox’s Ice Age stables are hit and miss. Coraline debuted with £2.43m in May; Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs with £1.58m last month; and Tale of Despereaux with £561,000 last December. The first two titles on that list, unlike Fantastic Mr Fox, benefited from the higher ticket prices of 3D. Take your pick as to which is an appropriate comparison.

A hit franchise stumbles
“If it’s Halloween, it must be Saw” is the message Lionsgate has been successfully pumping out for five years. And in the UK, since peaking with a £2.52m opening for Saw III in 2006, debut grosses for the ingenious torture franchise have been impressively consistent: Saw IV began its life with £2.48m, and Saw V with £2.44m. Now, at last, Saw takes a stumble: the latest installment has opened with £1.74m. The result echoes a similar underperformance in the US, which had been attributed mostly to competition from low-budget horror phenomenon Paranormal Activity. That film doesn’t open until 27 November in the UK, so Saw VI’s dip here presumably reflects market saturation after pictures on five consecutive Octobers. Saw VII is set to be in 3D; if only Lionsgate had managed to present Saw VI in the popular format, it might have been a whole different story.

Arthouse goes AWOL
Last October, foreign-language releases Gomorrah and I’ve Loved You So Long both played to packed arthouses, while crossover title The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas appealed widely to upscale audiences. Fast forward to October 2009, and there’s a dearth of arthouse hits, unless you count The Imaginarium of Dr Parnassus or smart comedy Zombieland, which we don’t. Top arthouse release is eco-documentary The Cove, which, despite lots of press and favorable reviews, opened at the weekened with a blah £18,000 from 27 screens, for a £665 average. The result goes to show how hard it is these days to get audiences to watch environment-themed documentaries in the cinema, even one that promises thrills and spills. The release this Friday of An Education can’t come soon enough for the nation’s independent cinemas.

The future
Michael Jackson’s This Is It is being unveiled to the world at the same time on Tuesday, which is fine if you live in LA (6pm) or New York (9pm), but not so great if you are in London (1am Wednesday morning), Paris (2am) and destinations east. Still, it’s all part of the hoopla Sony is building on the concert-rehearsal movie, and Michael Jackson fans should propel it to a stellar debut, especially since Wednesday and Thursday takings will be added in, giving a five-day opening “weekend” result. Advance ticket sales are said to be exceptionally high. After that, it’s more about how word of mouth can spread interest beyond the core fanbase.

UK top 10
1. Up, 549 sites, £3,807,003. Total: £19,683,204
2. Saw VI, 375 sites, £1,736,287 (New)
3. Fantastic Mr Fox, 481 sites, £1,517,312 (New)
4. Couples Retreat, 379 sites, £932,171. Total: £3,588,820
5. Cirque Du Freak: The Vampire’s Assistant, 385 sites, £798,641 (New)
6. The Imaginarium of Dr Parnassus, 268 sites, £616,719. Total: £2,068,715
7. The Invention of Lying, 307 sites, £362,760. Total: £5,538,932
8. Zombieland, 279 sites, £323,815. Total: £3,001,207
9. Fame, 373 sites, £218,110. Total: £8,311,403
10. Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, 369 sites, £142,011. Total: £5,881,661

How the other openers did
The Goods: Live Hard, Sell Hard, 100 screens, £36,360
The Cove, 27 screens, £17,956
Johnny Mad Dog, 2 screens, £6,439 + £3,279 previews
Made in Jamaica, 2 screens, £2,345
Coffin Rock, 2 screens, £184
Colin, 3 screens, no figures available

The moving 3D adventure turns into one of Pixar’s strongest performers, the Saw series shows its first dip, and fans line up for small-hours premieres of This Is It

The winner
Pixar’s Up remains super-buoyant at the top of the box office, with yet another slim decline – 26% – and cumulative takings of £19.68m. After 17 days on release, the animation is well ahead of Pixar’s previous release WALL-E at the same stage of its run last summer (£13.56m) and modestly ahead of Ratatouille (£17.29m). However, Ratatouille’s 17-day figure included the whole October half-term holiday from 2007, whereas that has only just begun for Up. The film should have an especially rich period between now and Sunday.

Up has already overtaken the lifetime total of Pixar’s worst-performing UK title, Cars (£16.5m), and should soon shoot past Toy Story (£22.3m), WALL-E (£22.9m) and Ratatouille (£24.8m). But it still has a long way to go to challenge Ice Age 3: Dawn of the Dinosaurs’ position as 2009′s biggest animation: that film, from rival studio Twentieth Century Fox, has been pushed back into cinemas for half-term and has now grossed £34.87m.

The rival animation
Offering an alternative to the computer-generated 3D sheen of Up is Wes Anderson’s determinedly lo-fi stop-motion animation Fantastic Mr Fox. Debut takings of £1.52m will be seen as not exactly stellar for a family film based on a recognised property (Roald Dahl’s 1970 story) – but taking all the factors into account, it’s an OK start. In the first place, Anderson has never been mega-box office, and has been on a declining revenue curve since his third movie, 2001′s The Royal Tenenbaums: that film, Life Aquatic and Darjeeling Limited opened with £700,000, £455,000 and £435,000, respectively. Secondly, takings for animations outside Disney/Pixar, DreamWorks and Fox’s Ice Age stables are hit and miss. Coraline debuted with £2.43m in May; Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs with £1.58m last month; and Tale of Despereaux with £561,000 last December. The first two titles on that list, unlike Fantastic Mr Fox, benefited from the higher ticket prices of 3D. Take your pick as to which is an appropriate comparison.

A hit franchise stumbles
“If it’s Halloween, it must be Saw” is the message Lionsgate has been successfully pumping out for five years. And in the UK, since peaking with a £2.52m opening for Saw III in 2006, debut grosses for the ingenious torture franchise have been impressively consistent: Saw IV began its life with £2.48m, and Saw V with £2.44m. Now, at last, Saw takes a stumble: the latest installment has opened with £1.74m. The result echoes a similar underperformance in the US, which had been attributed mostly to competition from low-budget horror phenomenon Paranormal Activity. That film doesn’t open until 27 November in the UK, so Saw VI’s dip here presumably reflects market saturation after pictures on five consecutive Octobers. Saw VII is set to be in 3D; if only Lionsgate had managed to present Saw VI in the popular format, it might have been a whole different story.

Arthouse goes AWOL
Last October, foreign-language releases Gomorrah and I’ve Loved You So Long both played to packed arthouses, while crossover title The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas appealed widely to upscale audiences. Fast forward to October 2009, and there’s a dearth of arthouse hits, unless you count The Imaginarium of Dr Parnassus or smart comedy Zombieland, which we don’t. Top arthouse release is eco-documentary The Cove, which, despite lots of press and favorable reviews, opened at the weekened with a blah £18,000 from 27 screens, for a £665 average. The result goes to show how hard it is these days to get audiences to watch environment-themed documentaries in the cinema, even one that promises thrills and spills. The release this Friday of An Education can’t come soon enough for the nation’s independent cinemas.

The future
Michael Jackson’s This Is It is being unveiled to the world at the same time on Tuesday, which is fine if you live in LA (6pm) or New York (9pm), but not so great if you are in London (1am Wednesday morning), Paris (2am) and destinations east. Still, it’s all part of the hoopla Sony is building on the concert-rehearsal movie, and Michael Jackson fans should propel it to a stellar debut, especially since Wednesday and Thursday takings will be added in, giving a five-day opening “weekend” result. Advance ticket sales are said to be exceptionally high. After that, it’s more about how word of mouth can spread interest beyond the core fanbase.

UK top 10
1. Up, 549 sites, £3,807,003. Total: £19,683,204
2. Saw VI, 375 sites, £1,736,287 (New)
3. Fantastic Mr Fox, 481 sites, £1,517,312 (New)
4. Couples Retreat, 379 sites, £932,171. Total: £3,588,820
5. Cirque Du Freak: The Vampire’s Assistant, 385 sites, £798,641 (New)
6. The Imaginarium of Dr Parnassus, 268 sites, £616,719. Total: £2,068,715
7. The Invention of Lying, 307 sites, £362,760. Total: £5,538,932
8. Zombieland, 279 sites, £323,815. Total: £3,001,207
9. Fame, 373 sites, £218,110. Total: £8,311,403
10. Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, 369 sites, £142,011. Total: £5,881,661

How the other openers did
The Goods: Live Hard, Sell Hard, 100 screens, £36,360
The Cove, 27 screens, £17,956
Johnny Mad Dog, 2 screens, £6,439 + £3,279 previews
Made in Jamaica, 2 screens, £2,345
Coffin Rock, 2 screens, £184
Colin, 3 screens, no figures available

Most weeks nowadays, there’s a vampire film from some corner of the globe. This week, there are two, one of a certain merit from the States (Cirque du Freak), the other an execrable British film.

Said to have been made for £45, Marc Price’s Colin is a confused, unoriginal and unimaginative hand-held account of a contaminated young man staggering around a London populated by flesh-eating zombies and death squads trying to wipe them out. The opening sequence, which for some reason is tagged on to the end, evokes George A Romero’s horror movies by way of a TV newscaster referring to a plague of zombies in Pennsylvania.

Stanley Kubrick’s horror classic has stood the test of time – it is terrifying because it takes us into the most awful place: our own heads

As much of a fixture on the filmic calendar as prematurely manic Oscar speculation, once Halloween approaches many minds turn to movies of a sinister bent. Cue warm tributes to Brazil’s Nietzschean bogeyman Coffin Joe, or Facet Features’ annual 31-day celebration of the likes of Wendigo and The Tingler. But for me, as much as I try and broaden my horizons, every time I come to write or even think about the subject I come creeping back to the same film. Because in my small corner of the world, Halloween, horror movies, even cinema, full stop, are all about The Shining.

And it’s strange, because I saw it young and was predictably awestruck, yet for years afterwards it never seemed to have any great hold on me. But recently Kubrick’s monstrous tour de force has loomed ever more insistently over my whole relationship with film. Its memory is, I’ve found, unshakable, as if the same dreadful currents the story located in the walls of the Overlook hotel somehow bled into the film itself and then, in turn, my private headspace.

God knows, its physical presence was powerful enough: the sheer grim spectacle of the snowbound Overlook or the fleeting bear-suit fellatio – so much rendered so appallingly dreamlike by its lack of explanation. All great horror films (all great films, period) share the ability to push your buttons, but The Shining was a symphony drummed out on the softest and most vulnerable points of the psyche. In the murderous Jack Torrance, we’re presented with cinema’s greatest portrait of predestiny: helplessness before fate however awful, the Fourth of July group photo waiting for us all. The true horror isn’t that Jack wants to kill his wife and child, but that he sees it as his duty.

There is, I realise, nothing very original about being under the spell of The Shining, staple of Family Guy pastiches and old Channel 4 100 Moments shows that it is. And yet, however overfamiliar its set pieces might be, there are times when even the most wilfully contrary of us have to fall in line with mainstream opinion. Because no matter how often we see Jack Nicholson gurning his way through the bathroom door, the pure cold magnificence of The Shining still leaves us freaked out to our cores – no amount of comic parody able to house-train this most profoundly disturbing of movies.

Of course film is a subjective medium, and I know that my own ever-growing fixation here is at least partly down to my own circumstances. I’m not above admitting that on my first viewing as a pallid teenager, the mere fact this was in part the story of a (then much younger than me) only child called Danny was enough to ensure a small amount of personal investment. Then, as an adult, I spent many long, dull hours in the course of my professional life staring at blank white space where joyful flights of fiction should be. Eventually, I had a kid myself: a son, the business of fathers and sons of course at the very centre of the project.

But what makes The Shining so extraordinary is that vast numbers of people I know of every conceivable background – non-writers, non-fathers, a whole lot of people not called Danny – has some kind of connection with it, a particular look to their face at just the mention of the title. Kubrick’s subcutaneous brilliance gets to everyone somehow, a moment for every personality type: for some it’s the Grady Girls, others Room 237, for others still the bloody lift doors. For me though, what I see when I close my eyes are the corridors – not even Danny Lloyd cycling through them but just the corridors, those silent, non-specifically unnerving hallways. We can take the film as a comment on the family, or the west, or just a string of chilling set pieces; but when I see those endless corridors it feels to me Kubrick could almost have been putting forward a visual take on the inside of one’s own head – so often the most awful place in which we’ll ever find ourselves.

If there ever was a zombie calamity on Britain’s streets, Peter Bradshaw fears it would look like this micro-budget thriller

First-time British director Marc Price has become a bit of an industry legend for this film. It’s a micro-budget zombie thriller that he reportedly shot on a camcorder for £45. The resulting release has been variously cheered on, derided and hyped, and it is the kind of film which is notoriously subject to upside-down embellishment on the subject of budget. The overall cost was clearly higher than £45, but I’ve seen duller and cheaper-looking films that have cost Britain’s lottery players an awful lot more. Colin is a ultra-minimal, ultra-experimental future-shock in the tradition of The War Game, Survivors and Threads. A nuclear war in the US has caused a viral catastrophe here. Corpses have come back to life, biting the healthy and spreading the disease. One such is Colin – whose sister refuses to kill him. Price focuses as much on human drama and social breakdown, as on the zombie phenomenon. As for the undead gamely played by Price’s mates, the acting and gurning and ketchup are a little broad, sure. But if there ever was a zombie calamity on Britain’s streets, I have a sinking feeling that it would look exactly like the cheap absurdist nightmare shown here.

After his passable, low-budget horror movie, Severance, the British writer-director Christopher Smith takes a big leap forward with this clever and compelling occult thriller. Shot on the coast of Queensland but set in Miami, it interweaves to potent effect Nietzsche’s theory of “eternal recurrence”, the mystery of the Mary Celeste and Sutton Vane’s once popular play Outward Bound.

A single mother, Jess (Melissa George), leaves her little son behind when she joins four other guests (two male, two female) on a friend’s yacht for a trip to sea. Suddenly, a freak storm blows up, a muffled SOS comes from a nearby vessel and then the yacht turns turtle. Rescue seems at hand when an old-fashioned luxury liner steams into view. Registered in Miami, the ship is called the Aeolus, which, as one of the characters usefully reminds us, is the name of the Greek god of the winds and father of the doomed trickster Sisyphus.

It appears deserted, no crew, no passengers, not even a Flying Dutchman at the helm. But Jess spots a fleeting glimpse of someone, sees a message in blood on a mirror, and takes up an axe in the manner of Jack Nicholson in The Shining. It’s creepy, atmospheric stuff and at every twist of this Möbius strip we wonder how Smith will keep things going. But he manages it with considerable skill and we leave his picture suitably shaken.

Five years ago, Chan-wook Park thrust himself to the front rank of the new Korean cinema with his violent, ingenious thriller, Oldboy, the only recent Asian movie I know to feature a girl who reads Sylvia Plath. Much influenced by David Fincher’s Se7en, it’s the centrepiece of his Vengeance Trilogy and was awarded the Grand Prix du Jury at Cannes by a tribunal presided over by Quentin Tarantino. His new film, Thirst, is similarly bloody and violent, and also influenced by western movies, in this case the current international cycle of vampire flicks, though still very much a thing of its own.

Hyun, the hero of Thirst, is a Catholic priest who volunteers to work at his order’s missionary hospital in Africa, where he contracts the deadly EV virus and faces certain death. Due to a last-minute blood transfusion, he miraculously survives and on his return to Korea, wrapped like a mummy to conceal the lesions and pustules, he’s dubbed “the bandaged saint” by his followers.

But moving into the household of an old school friend, he reacts to the smell of blood and is soon not only in need of the red stuff to keep his EV symptoms at bay but racked by sexual desire, which he meets, Opus Dei-fashion, by whacking his erect penis with the recorder he once used to serenade the dying patients he comforted.

One thing leads to another as he literally flies around, trying to satisfy his thirst without taking life or making the wrong kind of conversion. Unfortunately, a dissatisfied wife seduces him. She becomes a vampire, but in her case not averse to adultery or murder. This is a truly bizarre movie, a tragicomedy that Graham Greene might have written in collaboration with Bram Stoker. But it’s repetitive and overstays its initial welcome.