Roky Erickson & the Aliens: The Evil One

Roky Erickson: Don’t Slander Me, Gremlins Have Pictures

I can’t have been alone in my struggle to keep the two of them straight in my head: there’s the one set in the east end of London, in which a former BBC Spook tries to track down Jack the Ripper; and then there’s the one set in the east end of London, in which a former BBC Spook tries to track down a modern-day killer inspired by Jack the Ripper.

“Hannibal Lecter meets Jason Bourne”: that’s how director Ryuhei Kitamura unbeatably sells No One Lives’ indestructible serial killer hero. But his film is at its most interesting before it’s clear who Driver (Luke Evans, pictured below) is, or where we stand with anything that’s happening.

You’re Next has chutzpah. It’s a home invasion horror made with the vigorous energy and imaginative violence of a Warner Bros cartoon. Feeling like a record that starts at a stately 33 rpm and finishes at 45, it becomes progressively more crazed and comic, even as the screen swims in gore.

Things go bump in the night in James Wan's chilling latest, based on a supposedly true story. The Conjuring is an event horror movie, benefitting from a sizeable marketing budget and the distribution of a major studio (Warner Bros); appropriately enough it simply screams to be seen. And those looking for a touch of class to elevate their frights will find it heartening to hear that there's a leading role for Oscar nominee Vera Farmiga.

It could so easily have been The Walking Dead, where the living endlessly battle an ever-increasing tide of returnees from the beyond. The resurrected in the contemplative Returned weren’t zombies, but actual living people with a desire to pick up where they left off and reintegrate themselves into day-to-day life. Unfortunately for them, and for those they became reacquainted with, it couldn’t go smoothly.

Gaming's equivalent of Cormac McCarthy's The Road – here we see a post-apocalyptic zombie invasion not as an excuse for all-out gory action, but downbeat introspection, gentle character interaction and moral tests in the face of true, human horror.

The Last Of Us is an absolute must-play game, that doesn't entirely hit every note, but at least aims far higher than most videogames not just in terms of narrative ambition and grown-up storytelling, but also visual and action realism.

Byzantium is a vampire flick which in look and tone seems fashioned to resemble Tomas Alfredson's magnificently humane (if that's the right expression when speaking of the undead) Let the Right One In. Wonderfully, unlike most pictures of its ilk, the focus is almost entirely on the fairer sex, with its bloodsucking protagonists, played by Gemma Arterton and Saoirse Ronan, out to prove the female of the species more deadly than the male.

Man is, of course, the worst monster of all in this bleak, post-apocalyptic first-person shooter based on the best-selling "Metro" novels of Russian author Dmitry Glukhovsky. In Metro: Last Light, the last few of mankind are bunkered down in the old Moscow Metro stations, while the surface is only briefly navigable with a gasmask, and populated mostly by irradiated mutant creatures.

It has to have been the trailer, there's really no other explanation. Before the original Dead Island came out, there was a trailer. And not just a trailer, but the trailer – probably the most finely-crafted, greatest piece of teaser content ever created for film, TV or games. It's the only possible reason why Dead Island sold as well as it did... and unfortunately, there isn't a similarly brilliant trailer for its sequel, Riptide.