FrightFest Halloween 2022

FrightFest Halloween 2022

 

Tripping the Dark Fantastic

Director: LG White.

With: Simon Boswell, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Dario Argento, LG White.

UK 2022. 93 mins.

 

Simon Boswell in concert at Earth Theatre, London in 2021, with each track coming with some backstory from Boswell and interviews with a few director cameos. I have always loved ‘Santa Sangre’ and ‘Hardware’ scores (the former being one of my all-time favourite films) and the performances here are impressive with Boswell’s 12-piece band, Caduta Massi. Stepping in for Goblin – who had to cancel due to COVID – Boswell sticks a coffin on stage and concentrates on his horror scores. I still don’t care for ‘Demons’, and there’s some dodgy lyrics, but it’s a wonderful mix of rock-out and classical approaches via circus tunes, because Boswell covers a lot of ground and styles.

 

I thought a concert film/documentary was a curious/audacious way to start the Frightfest Halloween day, but I was thoroughly entertained. LG White – Boswell’s wife – is still editing and throws in lots of overlapping visuals to try to capture the stage activity and live video backgrounds featuring cameos (Iggy Pop! Argento!) and film clips. It’s a fine presentation.

 

Freeze

Director: Charlie Steeds.

With: Johnny Vivash, Ricardo Freitas, David Lenik, Jake Watkins.

UK 2022. 90 mins

 

Starts out promising a low-budget ‘The Terror’ Lovecraftian monster movie, which is all good. There’s admirable ambition, the Norwegian ice-scapes are breath-taking, but there’s some dubious acting and, worse, the monsters are somewhat ill-served. Not only is the fun design given away immediately (no build-up here - but just look at it!), and perhaps we can step back from questioning their logic (assumedly they are amphibious monsters that get their fishy food diving under the ice? Seals? Bears?), but their squat-walking really doesn’t seem to be any sense (I mean, they’re in a cavernous environment).

 

Gnomes

Director: Ruwan Suresh Heggelman.

With: Moïse Trustfull, Duncan Meijiring.

6mins.

 

I can report that Paul McEvoy, once of the FrightFest founders, sat near me and laughed his socks off to this. The main source of humour to this swift and hilarious short is the splatter excess. The designs of the gnomes and their attack machines are delightful. It’s a show-piece kill segment that doesn’t waste time in being outrageous.

 

Mad Heidi

Directors: Johannes Hartmann, Sandro Klopfstein.

With: Casper Van Dien, David Schofield, Alice Lucy, Leon Herbert

Switzerland 2022. 92 mins.

 

A parody frontloaded with its best gags, but then gets districted by women’s prison satire and then weighed-down by increasingly leaning on plot rather than jokes. Nevertheless, agreeable enough fun, powered mostly by Casper Van Dien’s consistently funny villainous performance.

 

Outpost

Director: Joe Lo Truglio.

With: Beth Dover, Dallas Roberts, Dylan Baker, Ato Essandoh.

USA 2022. 84 mins.

 

Takes a moment to settle down and make sense, but soon settles in to a seemingly straightforward tale of a woman trying to escape a troubled past of domestic abuse by becoming a fire marshal atop a forest lookout. A film unafraid to takes its time, strong on empathy and performances – Dylan Baker as the prickly neighbour and Ato Essandoh as Kate’s taciturn boss were personal favourites.       

 

It was obvious from the Q&A afterwards that Joe Lo Truglio wanted to be as sympathetic to his approach to PTSD with a potentially conventionally conventional thriller, and it is this that distinguishes ‘Outpost’ and motivates as well as allows for its narrative surprises.

 

On The Edge

Directors: Jen & Sylvia Soska.

With: Aramis Sartorio, Jen Soska, Sylvia Soska, Mackenzie Gray.

Canada 2022. 114 mins.

 

Aramis Sartorio gives his all while the Soskas pose and pout their performances. Any message about female empowerment is filtered into sadism-revenge fantasy as a family man that books a dominatrix in a hotel gets more than he bargained for. This sadism-revenge agenda also guided the Soska’s far superior ‘American Mary’ but the body-horror fascination there is replaced by two-bit Catholic morals here. Anal rape is the main source of humour. But even more egregiously is the badly recorded diagetic dialogue and amateurish sound mix that makes much incomprehensible. Which is problematic for a film that is constantly talking at you. Eventually it devolves into strobe lighting and bible verse and a simplistic morality play that makes a nonsense of any of its transgressive and feminist intent.

Look to 'Promising Young Woman', 'The Beta Test' or even 'The Special' for more nuanced, troubling and fun interrogations of these themes.

 

The Offering

Director: Oliver Park.

With: Nick Blood, Allan Corduner, Paul Kaye, Emm Wiseman.

USA 2022. 93 mins.

 

Introducing the film, director Oliver Park said it portrayed beat-for-beat terrifying nightmares he’d had since he was a toddler. One can only imagine that his nightmares came with bangs and blares and musical stings. Certainly I anticipated a more surrealist, nightmare-logic to the film, but what followed was a far more conventional horror. It relies too much on jump-scares, which quickly become tiresome, despite being distinguished by its Jewish family drama and folklore context, good performances and funeral home setting. 

______

Favourites: ‘The Outpost’, ‘Gnomes’.

Surprised I liked: ‘Tripping the Dark Fantastic’.

Sad that: I ended up being a little indifferent to ‘Mad Heidi’ after the opening had been such parody bonkers and fun. 

Blonde

 

Blonde

Director – Andrew Dominik

Writers – Andrew Dominik (written for the screen by), Joyce Carol Oates (based on the novel by)

Stars- Ana de Armas, Lily Fisher, Julianne Nicholson

 

Well, you’re not going to make many friends with such an interpretation, surely. With ‘Chopper’, Andrew Dominick was on safer ground with an irredeemable subject; and ‘The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford’ had the advantage of historical distance and being about criminals too. But Norma Jeans was a much more controversial and tricky choice, for Marilyn Monroe is much beloved. I was never one for the breathlessly ditzy blonde sex-bomb type and if nothing else the film established that Norma herself wasn’t much for it either. A criticism is that the Norma Jeane here doesn’t have much agency, but surely that’s the point. She is totally defined, concocted, manipulated, and abused by the male gaze. Projection is a central theme. And not every woman is an ass-kicker who can overcome and march defiantly towards the camera. This Norma is a far milder affair, not stupid but not bold enough to fight the overwhelming odds against her.

 

But make no mistake that this is all fiction, a fantasia, a somewhat sleazy imagining of a superstar’s sordid start and fall. Based upon Joyce Carol Oates’ novel, this should not be mistaken for a biopic and Dominick doesn’t pretend that’s the intent: it’s all impressionism and arty, dreamy and pretty, moving between black-and-white and colour at a whim. In this imagining, Norma Jeane’s happiest time is her marriage to Norman Mailer. In fact, it is this section where we get a little beneath the skin of the character, with her first meeting with Norman Mailer being the film’s highlight, for it effortlessly conjures how men underestimate her and her charm. Soon, Mailer mentions that she has no cruelty in her, and it’s hard not to think that these kind of insights come a little late in the film. Up until then, there’s a sense of speed-walking through Marilyn touchpoints, scared of not hitting all the beats. Although arguably this drags out the running time and rushes some of the rhythm. Arguably, this also stymies Ana de Armas’s performance as Norma in places, although she is always compelling, staggering and coping through the black-and-white Golden Age of Hollywood, sometimes with some exploitation nudity.

 

It reminded me of Mickey Keating’s ‘Psychopaths’. And perhaps that’s a clue as to the edginess and atmosphere of the film, that it would remind of such an arthouse horror oddity that’s about performance, artificiality and something unhinged. Certainly, Mark Kermode calls ‘Blonde’ a horror film. It’s to do with the tone of a woman’s fall, of the exploitation and tragedy. David Lynch is often namechecked when talking about ‘Blonde’, and certainly Cave and Ellis’ score hits on a ‘Twin Peaks’ Badalamenti feel at times. And again, to reiterate that this is a fiction based upon the narrative of Marilyn Monroe as victim. Marilyn Monroe through ‘Inland Empire’. When we get to a close-up of Norma fellating the President and then to the abortion, it even touches on Gasper Noe provocation.

 

There’s plenty of play and provocation in ‘Blonde’, and it’s apparent it doesn’t want to be everyone’s friend. There’s as much exploitation as artistry, and the lurid touches is to expose the seedy side of Tinsel Town, but there’s also a sense of having its cake and eating it. Where a real person/icon is involved, this can prove problematic, which is where all the accusations of misogyny come from, such a Stacey Henley’s condemnation. Perhaps a conventional biopic by Guy Maddin would look like this, but that would probably lean towards the humanitarian worldview rather than victimhood. Although its aesthetic goes all-in in a way that insists on its fiction, ‘Blonde’ hues so close to the Monroe-Jeane beats so that you can’t deny that making misery porn of a real life, all-but denying her agency and looking like you are joining in the objectification, leaves a somewhat sour aftertaste.

Fright Night (1985 & 2011)

Fright Night

Writer & Director – Tom Holland

1985, USA

Stars – Chris Sarandon, William Ragsdale, Amanda Bearse

 

A quintessential, trend-setting horror of the ‘80s, with this and especially ‘The Lost Boys’ bringing the John Hughes sensibility to the genre and making vampires teen-friendly and a rites-of-passage ordeal. The other one: ‘Near Dark’ was for the counter-culture kids. This may be the lesser of the three but Holland, though nowhere near as distinctive as Bigelow or Schumacher, nevertheless exhibits a sure grip on tone between genuine horror treats and the slightly tongue-in-cheek/satirical leanings. This was true of Holland’s ‘Child’s Play’ too.

 

Sarandon is sinister, seductive and svelte as old-fashioned Gothic vampires tend to be when they move in next door, and yet also assuredly modern; Roddy McDowell gives a little of retro-horror class; and Stephen Geoffreys manages to bring pathos to the Annoying Friend role, its excessiveness becoming a tragedy of loneliness. The link between death and sex sets it off – losing virginity is interrupted by spying the neighbours disposing of a body – and the obsession with this inspires our all-American boy protagonist’s neglectful behaviour towards his girlfriend. He needs to overcome this association to get on with his life; and/or he must overcome his voyeuristic fascination with the somewhat queer-coded neighbour and his “live-in carpenter” to get on with his sexuality.

 

There’s also an agreeably tendency towards the kinds of practical effects showcases that were defining 80s horror, dipping into werewolf transformations. It’s all very entertaining and enjoyably dated and silly, if nothing more, and features just the most 80s soundtrack.

 

 

Fright Night

Director – Craig Gillespie

Writers – Marti Noxon (screenplay) Tom Holland (story)

2011 – USA, India

Stars – Anton Yelchin, Colin Farrell, David Tennant, Imogen Poots, Tony Collette

 

If you’re going to do a re-mix, an updating, this version of ‘Fright Night’ does many things right. The cobalt blue of the Eighties has been contemporised for Twenty-First century blue-green night and the vampire certainly has more modern serial killer trimmings. Farrell is mostly menace over charm. Here the vampire called Jerry doesn’t have a “live-in carpenter” and his house is modern chic. In fact. It’s the charlatan/illusionist Peter Vincent who has all the Gothic décor (and in one of the film’s chief gags, a whole armoury of antiques); and in this version David Tennant’s Vincent is crude where Roddy McDowell was hammy.

 

Starts with a good home invasion. Like the original, doesn’t waste too much time with Charley’s nearest-and-dearest disbelieving him: in fact, it’s his disbelieving Ed that is a plot-point, although Ed is probably the most unconvincing portion here. The film finds its own set pieces, the most impressive being when the vampire starts digging up the garden and it escalates from there. The script is savvy enough to have neat touches like when you can’t ride the bike, just hurl it at the escaping car. There’s some under-impressive CGI. There’s the sensation, around this time, that this may actually improve on the original… but it doesn’t quite get there. Nevertheless, it’s decent undemanding horror fun with an above-average cast.

Strigoi

Strigoi

Writer & Director - Faye Jackson

2009 - UK

Stars – Catalin Paraschiv, Rudy Rosenfeld, Constantin Barbulescu

 

There’s no getting around that this is set in small community Romania and that is spoken in English with Romanian accents. This only adding to the feeling of a comedy sketch writ large (it's a British film). After a surprising opening plunging us straight into drama, the pacing is then more of a smoulder.

 

However, it’s droll and deadpan, consistently amusing and dryly funny (“Are you drinking my blood?!”), driven by its low-key agenda right to the end. A folklore vs vampire tale dressed up in a murder mystery: returning home to his village, Vlad suspects a town conspiracy to cover-up a lynching and sets about being brusque and suspicious of everyone, trying to get to the bottom of it.

 

Catalin Paraschiv as Vlad is agreeably bristly and down-to-earth, a necessary balance to the broader satirical village types. There are themes of being an outsider, of leaving for better things but that plan not quite working out; and the draw of going home again only unearthing more unpleasant truths. It’s not run on totally typical horror tropes; there’s a whole cultural history it is built upon which. Although much will undoubtably go over the heads of anyone unfamiliar with Romanian history and archetypes (that's me), there’s the sense of being educated to its richness. Alexandra heller-Nicholas writes,

 

“In this film, the villains are those who hold powers; not just politicians, but land-owners whose legacy of stealing the homes and livelihoods of their neighbours impacts the present day in very real ways – economic bloodsuckers.”

 

And that’s easy to relate to.

 

There’s folk horror here, also a committed and unfussy approach to merging the supernatural with the prosaic: it’s the kind of world where the supernatural is part of everyday trouble. In that way, it's a small delight.

Hatching

 

Hatching

Director - Hanna Bergholm

Writers - Hanna Bergholm(story by), Ilja Rautsi

2022 – Finland, Sweden

Stars –Siiri Solalinna, Sophia Heikkilä, Jani Volanen

 

A Finnish family is blogging about their daily perfection when, one day, they are gate-crashed dramatically by a crow.

 

Following many contemporary horrors where the analogies, metaphors and symbolism are all on the surface, leading the narrative (‘The Babadook’ and ‘Men’ come to mind), this is the tale of a mother fermenting something monstrous due to the relentless ambitions she has for her daughter. This is very much a matriarchy, a passive-aggressive power with the father-figure worn down and cuckolded. The tantrums of the younger son notwithstanding, this isn’t really a household allowing insurrection, and it’s the twinges of disillusion and rebellion that causes the supernatural upheaval.

 

It is very ikky, well performed and rendered in glossy magazine clarity, a little on the nose and a little Grimm’s fairy tale. But if there isn’t so much subtext, the film follows through logically (and sadly) on its metaphor in a manner that reflects and elucidates on the characters. The practical effects are a bonus: the monster is unsettling and unforgettable*. There is something equally stylish and visceral offered by ‘Hatching’, and a creature-feature with arthouse execution and intention; Hanna Bergholm directs both with arthouse and horror sensibilities (like ‘Olga’ meets Guillermo Del Toro). This makes ‘Hatching’ a highly enjoyable and an often discomforting horror coming-of-age, even if only for Sophia Heikkilä’s smile.

 

·     * I had the bonus of not knowing this would be a creature feature, having just picked up the positive reputation without knowing so much. So when the egg cracked and it the creature appeared, I chuckled to myself with delight.

"Stick Figure on Fire" - new I Am The Twister EP

 

A new I AM THE TWISTER ep, "Stick Figure on Fire". 

I Am The Twister was an early musical venture with Paul West that kind of fell by the wayside for over a decade. Some of it is 4-track - that's how long ago. We went off to do Book of Buzz. However, we recently found a new urge to do things again and a new place to play, so here we are. The original inspiration to restart was something else, but this ep allowed to finish up some older stuff before we got into anything else. 

This one is guitar & voice based, marinated in digital dislocation, suburban gentrification and despondence. 

"Homemade & Heartburnt" - new Buck Theorem EP

Here is my new EP, "Homemade & Heartburnt", written for and made to coincide with the session I wrote for the Homebrew Electronica podcast. It was very, very nice to be invited by Kev [the Homebrew host] to contribute a session, so I wrote some new stuff.

Rock-n-roll electro-horror. Some anxiety oversensitivity dancing. A Soma Pipe version of an older track, a fake soundtrack instrumental and a straight-up ambient track. Oh, and a Godley & Creme cover.

And here's the link to the whole Homebrew show (I start at around 40 minutes in). It's always stuffed with good and varied stuff, spanning the breadth of what electronic music is and can do.

The House

The House

Writers/directors:

Emma De Swaef (segment I: And Heard Within a Lie Is Spun)

Paloma Baeza (segment III: Listen Again and Seek the Sun)

Niki Lindroth von Bahr (segment II: Then Lost Is Truth That Can't Be Won)

2022 – UK, USA

Stars/voices – Mia Goth, Matthew Goode, Claudie Blakley, Jarvis Cocker

 

A fascinating trilogy of animated oddities taking place in the same house, but independent of one another. The ominous forces at work in the first tale are not those in the others, for example. But thematically, they are bonded by the fact that the house and the stories are propelled by money angst.

 

Firstly, the house in the past is the plaything of a feudal omnipresent power that takes everything you have and turns you into your work. There is genuine, gleeful Gothic eeriness here and the kind of absurdism that only animation can get away with.

 

Secondly, the house that promises yuppie opportunity can’t quite hide its flaws, or lonliness. The world now seems to be owned by anthropomorphic rats, and protagonist rat is one with financial ambitions for the house. It’s going to make him a heap of money when he sells it. But something more ominous has other plans. The object of your greed will move in and consume you and you’ll barely be in control. Perhaps the most abstract episode of the trilogy and moving from Gothic horror to the horror of discomfort and failing.

 

Thirdly, the house is the last refuge in a flooded post-disaster world. The cats have taken over now and, despite a ravaged world where they no longer know if anything is out there, our cat protagonist insists on living on the old ways, of playing the part of a determined landlord and aiming to get more money to fix up the place. The lesson she must learn is to let go of her money-based worries and take a chance on the unknown. If it’s message of achieving independence is congenial, it’s method of reaching this via self-help caricatures may not be so convincing. Of the trilogy, this is the most obvious entry, but relies on and has plenty of bright, low-key charm.

 

The segment titles imply a thought-out premise holding it all together. the exploitation of the worker; the delusion of personal aspiration; the need to move onto something unknown but genuinely freeing.

 

There is a consistently agreeable oddness throughout the shifts in tone between segments, so that it does feel like a whole meal and not just differing treats. The attention to detail, amazing set-designs and craftmanship are often stunning, as you might expect from a stop-motion endeavour that is obviously a labour of love (the fish tank was a particular highlight for me). But it was how the whole enterprise was phenomenally lit that constantly took my breath away. An uncanny delight that keeps a hold of its mysteries.

 

And Jarvis Cocker too.

Don't Be Afraid of the Dark

Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark

Director – John Newland

Writer – Nigel McKeand

1973 - USA

Stars – Kim Darby, Jim Hutton, Barbara Anderson

 

From the opening musical sting and the freeze-frame black cat credits, you know you’re in the Seventies. This is the TV movie whose legend has persisted through a certain generation as a minor classic. A kindertrauma of renown; indeed, “one of the scariest made-for-TV horror filmsof the 20th century.” (I’ll reserve the accolade for “the most” to ‘Salem’sLot’.) And this datedness is part of the appeal, from the casting and acting and set design, etc.

 

Kim Darby gives a somewhat underwhelming performance as the housewife who’s starting to feel second place to her husband’s ambition. Typically, she’ll go shopping with friends and gripe about their husbands. However, Darby’s lethargy does convey a neglected woman whose discontent manifests as homunculi in the sealed-up chimney she insists upon opening, whispering her name. There’s lots of comic book colouring amongst the shadows – greens and purples – sinister muttering, some male condescension, and the little creatures come across as predecessors for ‘The Gate’. The monsters are like malevolent pranksters whose stony visages have their own ability to inscribe on the imagination in a way that more realistic creatures couldn’t. And they have that “something in the house is out to get me” vibe that, admittedly, is abetted by the characters’ inefficiency with light switches.

 

It has a lot of retro-appeal, a little Seventies Gothicism and spookiness and a surprisingly downbeat ending in that the discontent ultimately triumphs, despite her husband realising too late that he needs to pay attention. In this way, like ‘Something Evil’, it’s a creepy minor and memorable horror about supernatural manifestations of a woman’s unhappy stagnation in a traditional second fiddle housewife role. And therefore a little more subversive than its TV movie context and simple surface scares might imply.