WHEN EVIL COMES/MASTERCLASS IN HORROR

There seem to be more ways to terrify than ways to love, and nearly as many people wanting the one as the other, at least in movies. This new horror tale finds yet another one.

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When Evil Comes started out innocuously enough as a simple series of horror tales for mobile phones – the world’s first – written and directed by Cambridge brain Johannes Roberts.

As is the way with terror, the vehicle is simple: this time an unusual text message, one with the power of granting the recipient's wildest desires ("unusual", indeed), goes missing and triggers a series of freak accidents at the weird Willburn Hall, a boarding school lost in a remote part of the US.

But, despite its modest mobile origins, its originality and a staggering performance from Sean Pertwee as the besieged caretaker at the school has meant that When Evil Comes has proved popular enough to merit a full length feature version.

The action now takes place in a conventional US high school where a pretty but unpopular girl gets that mysterious text message and begins to find her wishes coming true. In short, all her former enemies quickly suffer gruesome fates, with a host of nasty knock on effects.

The girl in a wheelchair run over by an ambulance and the headmaster who disciplines his students with a limb he finds in the corridor are particularly edifying.

Release in cinemas is from June 18th.

To get your shivers before that, try the trailer.

Posted May 29, 2008.