FrightFest Halloween 2024

FrightFest Halloween 2024

It’s funny how you slip into that film festival routine so quickly – eating improperly, snacking, recognising faces, seeing friends, etc. This year, as some of us retreat to the big screen for genre treats, outside they are turning the middle of Leicester Square into Paddington Bear Promotional Peru – and perhaps I am mistaken, but it seems especially busy.

To the films…

Sam Yates’ ‘Magpie’ is a slick, well presented anti-toxic masculinity revenge thriller, but one that doesn’t seem to think we’ve caught on long before the revelation.

 

Isaac Ezban’s ‘Parvulos’ has a similar structural flaw: it is too long and feels it because it doesn’t quite know how to place its beats. There are also tonal instabilities that throw you out a little (no zombie sex in front of the kids, please) and a little queasy quirk about vaccines. Three brothers trying to survive the apocalypse: the young actors give it all; the aesthetic is so washed out it’s often black and white; there’s some nice casual build-up, but it’s all increasingly a little bitty. You can tell it is heartfelt, which seems to make a blindspot to its deficiencies, but it meanders along long enough for the audience to notice.  The aesthetic and the central horror of potential starvation do a lot to make this memorable, but if you’re bored of zombies this won’t change your mind. 

 

Airell Anthony Hayles ‘Advent’ has an inspiration that’s more troubling than anything the film offers (The Blue Whale Challenge). It lacks the imagination to exploit its limited household claustrophobia, or to go for jump-scares, or to make the challenges surprising or disturbing, or to fill the short running time with interest.

Guido ​​Tölke’s ‘A Bitter Taste’ also suffers from being too long and tempo issues: it dives straight in and veers between beautiful visuals and the kind of over-editing that hints at desperate amateurishness. It’s not amateurish, but it is messy and lacks a focus and pace that would make this fun. It has a giallo flavouring, and the wild body-horror of the finale almost makes it worthwhile, but it’s exhausting rather than amusing.

I was probably expecting ‘Alien Country’ to be a little ‘Mars Attacks’, which it isn’t, but it’s funny and goofy. Obviously in love with its Utah Small Town Americana, it’s K.C. Clyde’s natural funnyman charm that holds it all together while peppered with small winning gags (“Chase mixtape”; “Zombies – this far North?”; cops discussing bakery). Endearing.

Yusron Fuadi ‘The Draft!’ is generically stumbling along it’s tropes, when suddenly its title makes sense and opens up a host of meta-gags. Even the score set to “overkill” and a gag reel make sense in context. Surprisingly smart and amusing.

Chris Reading’s ‘Time Travel is Dangerous’ is winningly funny from the start – two slightly daft and self-obsessed vintage shop owners use time-travel to stock their store – but gets lost in a story that takes a less interesting, more self-obsessed and less funny inter-dimensional story. It's "How did we end up here?", but in a way that squanders interest.

Any seasoned horror fan will get where this is going from the opening credits collage. Teddy Grennan’s ‘Catch a Killer’ makes for a thriller whose stylishness belies its B-genre concept, but it’s slick, entertaining, very enjoyable and hosts a great central performance from Sam Brooks. And for once, the romance feels worthwhile rather than performative. I for one appreciate the swiftness of the ending as opposed to a originally conceived protracted showdown that would have highlighted more problematic elements.

It's the slow burn of Emma Benestan’s ‘Animale’ that draws you in with Oulaya Amamra’s soft-and-tough performance riveting from the start. The slow burn allows the etching of the community and character to soak in. If it ends up being more obvious than promised, not realising that it need not be, it is nevertheless fascinating, exhibiting a sure hand and sense of place and culture in the Carmague region bull running context. And what to do with a bull running woman, eh men?

 

So it's the back-end selection that proved most rewarding.

 Performances of the festival: 

• Oulaya Amamra ~ 'Animale'
• Sam Brooks ~ 'Catch a Killer'
• K.C. Clyde ~ 'Alien Country'

 
 
 

Dawn Breaks Behind the Eyes

 

Dawn Breaks Behind the Eyes

Director ~ Kevin Kopacka

Writers ~ Kevin Kopacka, Lili Villányi

2021, Germany

Stars ~ Anna Platen, Jeff Wilbusch, Frederik von Lüttichau

There is great set design and plenty of atmosphere as a couple come to the castle she’s inherited, and weirdness then ensues. He’s a dick, barely capable of speaking without negativity or condescension; she’s a bit of a selfish ice maiden. They seem made for one another. And then there’s a sharp turn into a shock-scene and then meta.

Expert recreations of subgenres are the norm now, and Kopacka’s film is no slouch. The title font is a dead giveaway that this will be a pastiche of retro-styles; both story and cinematic nature will be period pieces. Giallo is foremost, but the feel goes through ghost stories, films-within-films-within-realities-within-realities, a stop by vampires and home invasions, euro-horror, mystery, counter-counter psychelica and seemingly whatever takes its fancy. It’s the kind of esoteric playfulness that leaves cineasts beguiled and reviews almost as opaque as the enterprise itself.

The difference to old giallo to recent neo-giallo is that the latter is more self-aware in its playfulness where the former can often feel like cut-and-paste held together by great aesthetic: ‘Dawn Breaks Behind the Eyes’ goes all kind of places, fakes out this way, piles on layers and gothic restlessness, and probably demands more than one watch to work out. A little like a melding of 'Knife + Heart' and the work of Cattet and Foranzi. It doesn’t outstay its indulgences or invite impatience, leaving its mysteries quite intact because it doesn’t really move beyond the abstract and ambiguous. You’ll be left scratching your head but thinking that that’s your fault.  There are lots of dead ends and possibilities, and of course it all goes up in flames, but light on conclusion. As a fever dream of a couple’s disintegration, there’s plenty to delve into here.

 

Us

Us

Jordan Peele, 2019, USA-Japan

Jordan Peele’s ‘Us’ starts with the Reagan-era commercial for “Hands Aross America”  playing on a tv set with ‘C.H.U.D.’ on the VHS pile beside it, and this juxtaposition proves a big clue to the film’s agenda – ripping the trick from ‘Climax’. Oh, should I then write that as ‘U.S.’? The focus of many reviews will be on the film’s sociology and politics, and Amanda Marcotte provides a useful and direct analysis that ‘Us’ concerns the uprising of the consequences of Reaganism. Peele says ‘Us’ is not about race this time, and it’s true that its metaphors are set more on class, but of course class will always feature race. The director of ‘Get Out’ is unlikely to ever be able to escape the shadow of that debut, but it is also unlikely that he would want to. Just to say that having a black family as central protagonists in a horror film seems quietly ground-breaking enough (see Shudder’s ‘Horror Noire’ for a fine run-through of the dearth of black representation in the genre). 

But why both ‘Get Out’ and ‘Us’ will have longevity beyond being attuned to their contemporary contexts, their eras and political climate, is that they deliver their horror wholeheartedly and with panache. ‘Get Out’ had the don’t-go-there premise, the dark secrets of a superficially benign community and the mad scientist trope. ‘Us’ has the doppelganger, the monsters underground, home invasion, the bodysnatchers and repressed coming up from the tunnels. Both films are stuffed full of all this horror stuff so while all the social commentary and poignant analogies are taking most of the attention, these tropes are providing all the fun. And they are fun films too: they are good with the natural humour. Maybe ‘Get Out’ suffers from having an obvious comic relief, but the humour in ‘Us’ is far more organic and fulfils much of the crowd-pleasing. 

I saw a Twitter witticism by someone that he had just overdosed on ‘Us’’s metaphors and had to lay down. Surely some will accuse Peele of trying too hard, of being too full of itself, but going off the rails and reaching too far is what horror does and Peele has a fine sense of the balance between fun and symbolism. After all, it’s not as if Romero’s ‘Dawn of the Dead’ is subtle. Peele is obviously wallowing and enjoying the tropes so if you read this as cliché, it’s not going to exceed disappointment. And there are all the references and rips from other films – there’s ‘Climax’ at the start, there’s ‘Funhouse’, even the red of ‘Don’t Look Now’, if you like, or Myer’s boiler suit, and the glove that is both a reference to Freddy and Michael Jackson – and on it goes. Typical of contemporary horror, the Easter eggs for fans are plentiful. 

And that Peele delivers good, solid and relatable characters that are far above the genre standard shouldn’t be undervalued. One of the notable touches is how he has characters in such outrageous scenarios talking in a more realistically casual manner that isn’t quite typical of the genre. It helps the whole cast deliver memorable performances whilst still working as archetypes (the man-child horny husband, the indifferent teen, the unfulfilled trophy wife, etc.). Lupita Nyong’o especially gives exceptional lead and support performances, proving again that the genre is giving women some of the best roles around ~ but everyone gives great twin performances.

The doppelgangers are, of course, the Ids of the characters: the brutish father, the creepy grinning daughter, the animalistic and destructive son. It is with the son, Jason (Evan Alex), that there is perhaps one of the films greatest subtleties: at a crucial moment, he seems to realise that Pluto (his double) is the worst of him, but that they come from the same stock and so intuits Pluto’s trap, that he can control his “tethered”, then apparently melding with Pluto to thwart him. And although everyone gives fantastically physical and otherworldly Id-performances, it is surely Evan Alex’s scrambling around like a monkey or a spider that remains most memorable, and so at odds with the more prosaic character of Jason. Even Umbrae’s (Shahadi Wright Joseph) smile-like-a-horror-icon and Red’s horror-croaky voice are pulled back just at the moment of being over-done. 

But like ‘Get Out’, ‘Us’ almost sabotages itself with an unsubtle moment where everything stands still for exposition. These moments are untypical of the fluid flow and fine judgement on display before and after, but it seems there is so much to get in that Peele hasn’t yet quite figured how to avoid these moments of obviousness. But nevertheless, much else is so strong that surely this weakness can be forgiven. 

It’s not so much about the twist which any genre-savvy viewer will suspect/know – so it’s barely a twist at all, maybe – but how the film plays with that throughout and what it goes on to say: it’s about how, given the chance, she came from the underground and learnt all the signifiers and mannerisms to be the thing above ground, in a comfortable middle-class and loving family. Did we think she was just playing a part, because she really did seem to care about the kids, etc.? No, she undoubtedly really meant it. Give the underclass a chance and they’ll be indistinguishable from the privileged. Hell, they might even achieve “Hands Across America” where the privileged failed.

It's a little uneven, a little mumbled, but‘Us’ is a far more open work, far

more willing to let the audience pile in with interpretation where ‘Get Out’ was more definite. It’s chock-full of social commentary and symbolism that can be parsed long afterwards. It helps that there are many striking images to hang it all on and that it’s all nicely and sharply filmed – already I note costume companies are taking the film’s get-ups as Halloween options. Peele offers another meal of genre tropes to interrogate another perennial topic of sociological horror, but does so with humour, vigour and with a sense that the genre can stab and viscerally reveal subjects in ways that others cannot. 

The Final Girls

Todd Strauss-Schulson, 2015, USA

Another post-modern horror playing with the themes the genre is built on, this time Carol J Clover’s “Final Girl” trope. Since the success of ‘Scream’ the genre has been eating and regurgitating itself in this way to varying effects, and there is a lot of fun to be had. It’s like gently pranking a friend.  Unimaginatively, it’s packaged on the cover with another selection of pouty young people in a line-up (yes, you came for carnage but you also came for the some cheap prods for your libido, kids) and another killer derived from ‘Friday the 13th’. This one begins strongly with a girl mourning her scream-queen mother – lost in a car accident – when there’s a fire in the cinema and she and some friends try to escape through the screen but find that they escaped into it. They’ have, in fact, entered the 1980s summercamp slasher flick that made her mother cult-famous. Initially this provides jokes at the expense of that particular sub-genre and, because it’s all bright and breezy, it’s all good. The best gag is perhaps that the characters can tell when the killer is coming by the Jason Vorhees-like musical cue on the soundtrack (ch-ch-ch-ch). Every now and again it shows some of the vitality it began with – a car crashing through the title that displays when and where the flashback is, for example – but it runs out of steam by the end, veering into tired emotional outpourings to try and achieve some resonance. By the time the end credits are full of outtakes of goofs, the meta-horror comes across as enjoying itself behind the scenes more than onscreen and not being as clever as it thinks it is.