Whereas The House Of The Devil took the Satanic Panic movies of the '60s and '70s as its inspiration, Kill List looks across a wider spectrum of cinema and offers a smorgasbord of genre nods ranging from domestic drama to strange, all-powerful cults. A film that divided critics unlike any other recent horror film that springs to mind, Kill List opens with a dinner party scene which could have been pulled from a Mike Leigh movie and ends with a nightmarish scenario which has rightly been compared to The Wicker Man. Director Ben Wheatley fills in the gap between these genre-hopping bookmarks with a central act that feels more like a conspiracy thriller - albeit a very dark one - than a horror movie. Kill List only made back half of its tiny $800,000 budget, a terrible state of affairs for one of the bravest and most challenging horror movies of the 21st century. But at least opinion seems to be swerving in its favour - if you can forgive the pun, Kill List finally appears to be gathering something of a cult following.
