Mercy

When two young boys move with their mother to a decrepit farmhouse to look after their dying grandmother, they discover that there are dark forces at work. As they begin to suspect that their Gramma Mercy may have encountered an evil spirit they find themselves fighting for their lives.

Why we’re looking forward to this: Yes, it’s another spooky old house in the middle of nowhere, but Mercy has two big things going for it. One, it’s an adaptation, albeit a very loose one, of one of our favourite Stephen King short stories and two, it stars Chandler Riggs, best know to most people as Carl Grimes on AMC’s superb The Walking Dead series.

For such a scary story, it’s surprising that “Gramma” (originally appearing in King’s 1985 Skeleton Crew collection) has only been tackled on screen once before, and then only as a 1986 episode of The New Twilight Zone with a screenplay penned by the legendary Harlan Ellison. Though there is always the danger of spreading the source material too thinly as happened with Children of the Corn, the involvement of Riggs who we rate as one of the finest up and coming young actors around ensures that if nothing else his performance should be worth watching.

Mercy is out now on iTunes and hopefully on DVD in the near future.

A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night

Strange things are happening in Bad City, an Iranian ghost town that is home to junkies, prostitutes and other sordid souls. A lonely vampire stalks its streets, preying on its most unsavoury inhabitants, but when boy meets girl, an unusual love story blossoms.

Why we’re looking forward to this: Despite sounding like the opening line of a particularly dark joke, A Girls Walks Home Alone At Night might just be the most interesting and exciting movie to pop up on our radar for a good while. It’s not often that we get excited about a new vampire movie, but this stylish debut feature from Iranian director Ana Lily Amirpour looks absolutely stunning, shot in black and white and with a distinctly noirish Sin City feel to it.

Described as an Iranian Vampire Western, the film played to rave reviews at this year’s Sundance and looks like it could inject some new blood into the vampire genre.

A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night is getting a limited theatrical outing in the US this month ahead of a home release early next year.

RICH COSGROVE