Above Average Joe Blogs

By the time I'd sprinted to the end of Outlast 2's lean campaign of around 6 hours the opening tension had long since died out to be replaced by utter confusion, bewilderment, and jaded cynicism at the amount of violence, only punctuated with the occasional creepy image. Australia's Funniest Home Videos got dark. That isn't to say Outlast 2 is a bad game, far from it, but in terms of horror it is decidedly average, too eager to the throw gore and obscenities on top of gore and obscenities, when a quiet lull and sinister shadow would have made you tremble from head to toe. I think the intensity of my negativity above stems from the fact that the game has at its core an interesting premise. Much like the original Outlast your character is in the reporter/journalist school of archetypes, which serves as the reasoning for why he insists on filming everything. That's right, for the uninitiated the Outlast series focuses on first person horror with the option of...

About two thirds of the way through the new Australian horror film Hounds of Love, a door is closed, screams are heard and the shot fades to black. In this scene there is no explicit violence, and for the majority of the film the violence is off-screen and implied, yet my heartbeat must've been about to explode out of my chest. When the scene had finished, the blood pumping around my ears gone, only then did I notice that just to my right, a few seats down, a woman in the cinema was weeping, stifling back tears. That's how much of an impact this film had without showing any violence. Hounds of Love is the debut film by Australian director Ben Young, not that you'd know it was his first time with this terrifying little film, about the kidnapping of a young girl by a serial killer couple in the suburbs of Perth. The cinematography and acting are all brilliant, with the central three performances of Ashleigh Cummings, ostensible victim, and Emma Booth and Stephen Curry as th...