What I'm watching this month...

It's Valentine's Day weekend, so you can be sure that DVD players everywhere were whirring away, playing every known romantic comedy under the sun, both yesterday and today. Whilst I do enjoy a lovey-dovey film from time to time,  I managed to convince my significant other into starting the first season of Bates Motel this weekend; a programme I had seen but they had not.

So cosy on the sofa, eating our heart-shaped Thornton's chocolates, we started the first episode. And if a dark, twisted drama with strong Mama's boy undertones doesn't say 'I love you', then I don't know what does.

The Conjuring review: Spooky but intelligent

In this day and age, it's no secret that horror films aren't particularly considered "well-constructed movies". In so many modern horrors, the pure aim has been to make audiences jump or make them feel nauseous. The Conjuring hasn't been tarnished with those cheap techniques and that's what makes it the only stand-out scary for some time!

It's no surprise that it spawns from director James Wan, who helped bring us Saw and Insidious, films which did start to resonate with audiences upon their release. Is Wan slowly becoming the new master of all things sinister? He seems to be trying to reinvent the genre, attempting to make it more of a serious avenue for films to go down rather than a tainted one.

Wan to look out for!

From the director of Saw, Insidious and a personal favourite horror movie of mine, Dead Silence, comes The Conjuring. Based upon the story of the real-life paranormal investigators, Ed and Lorraine Warren, who were the first people to investigate the Amityville haunting, when they go to help the Perron family convinced they are being threatened by powerful entity.

What is intriguing me about this upcoming film is it doesn't look like your typical demonic film. Due to flops like The Last Exorcism, Apartment 143 and The Devil Inside, the mockumentary style has been labelled as a risky technique. With these types of films, it's sometimes hard to tell whether you're watching something that is trying to be ridiculously authentic or just a purely constructed movie, but James Wan seems to have gone at it from a different angle, which looks to be like it might save "mockumentary" altogether.