So I’m still in London, and have just emerged from the five days of cinematic insanity that is FrightFest, an annual horror film festival held at Leceister Square’s resplendent Empire Cinema.
Comprised entirely of premieres and preview screenings of new horror films that run the gamut from mainstream to obscure, FrightFest is an exciting opportunity to sample the state of modern horror cinema, and take in a bunch of new genre films free from the burden of too much advance knowledge.
I had tickets for fourteen movies across the five days, just more than half the films on offer. What follows is my journal of my experience along with first-reaction reviews, recorded as the festival progressed.
The opening film of the festival is the Guillermo Del Toro-produced haunted house horror Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark, a film I am very excited to see. But first up is a short John Carpenter homage, the first of several created especially for the festival. It’s called Escape From London and is kinda fun (I snicker at the requisite Cleveland joke), but I’m principally focused on how dazzled I am by the interior of Empire’s Screen 1 – a huge (1330 seat) amphitheatre-shaped cinema with a slightly curved screen. It is truly magnificent, and filled to the brim with fellow film nuts. I am stoked to be here.
Following Escape From London, there are some introductions from the organizers, then the curtains open once again to a video intro from Guillermo Del Toro. He describes how the eponymous 1973 TV Movie that inspired the new film haunted his childhood, and how he’s been trying to mount a remake for eleven years. As usual, Del Toro comes across as a film fan first, and a filmmaker second. I love that guy.
Don’t Be Afraid of The Dark stars Guy Pearce and Katie Holmes as a young couple restoring an old country manor. Pearce’s sullen daughter from a previous relationship (Bailee Madison from Just Go With It) is sent to live with them, and she discovers some nasty little creatures scuttling about in the air vents. It’s a fun watch, but not quite as atmospheric or creepy as it could’ve been, or perhaps if Del Toro himself was at the helm (he co-wrote the screenplay with Matthew Robbins, who collaborated on a few projects with Steven Spielberg in the ’70s and ’80s, and is credited on Mimic, Del Toro’s 1997 English language debut).
There’s too little effort put into setting up the “normal” life of the characters and the environment, so things going bad feels like a foregone conclusion, and consequently the thrills are diminished. But the little creatures are awesome in a specifically Del Toro-ish way, and the film features a couple of really good frights.
Following this screening I experience what is sure to be my personal highlight of the festival: I spot legendary film critic and leading horror film expert Kim Newman standing about in the foyer. Despite my shame, I can’t resist approaching him for a quick gush and a photo. I talk about much his writing has influenced me (I’m currently working my way through the recently published updated edition of Nightmare Movies, his seminal book on modern horror), and how much I’ve enjoyed his work since discovering him in the pages of Empire twenty years ago. He is very nice, and really looks like what you’d imagine a horror film expert to look like.
Next up it’s Final Destination 5, but prior to the screening, some of the filmmakers behind the 2006 horror comedy Severence come on stage to debut some scenes from their upcoming movie Cockneys Vs. Zombies. The cynicism I instantaneously develop upon hearing the title is disarmed once the footage unspools, which looks pretty good. A race between an aged British acting legend Richard Briers (The Good Life; Monarch of the Glen) on a walker and a lumbering zombie has the audience in stitches.
Final Destination 5 plays out to a generous crowd that applauds each successive death. You can read my full review of that movie here, but let me just mention that my ocular trauma fears were well founded, and I very much had to cover my face during the laser eye surgery scene.
The late night screening on opening day is the Grand Guignol anthology The Theatre Bizarre, which feaures six tales of bloody terror (from six different directors) interspersed with a wraparound story featuring cult icon Udo Kier. In the ’70s, you couldn’t swing a dead cat without hitting a horror anthology, but since then, apart from the odd exception like 1982’s Creepshow; 1983’s Twlight Zone: The Movie (both of which I love), and Tales From the Darkside: The Movie (1990) – not to mention the recent straight-to-video Bryan Singer-produced Trick ‘r’ Treat (which is well worth checking out) – they’ve been few and far between. This is the first of two screening at FrightFest, so I’m clearly not the only one nostalgic for these kinds of movies.
The stated lack of conference between the directors leads to some wild tonal shifts between the shorts in The Theatre Bizarre, which typically vary in quality: The Mother of Toads from cult director Richard Stanley (Hardware; The Island of Dr. Moreau) is an icky little number about American tourists getting caught up in some dark magic in France. Buddy Giovinazzo’s I Love You is a captivating and well-acted O. Henry-ish tale of a disintegrating relationship. Horror make-up legend Tom Savini (Dawn of the Dead; Machete) lets it all hang out with his shamelessly gory Wet Dreams, during which a severed penis is fried with eggs for breakfast, and that’s one of the milder shocks. Douglas Buck’s The Accident is affecting examination of how a child processes death, and evokes Terrence Malick with its lyrical style and quietly intimate dialogue.
And then there was Karim Hussain’s Vision Stains, which I could barely watch at all, as it was about on a woman who would kill junkies, extract their eyeball fluid via a hyperdermic needle (youch!) and mainline it intravenously so she could experience a montage of their visual memories. I’d already been knocked about by the ocular terror in Final Destination 5, and Tom Savini chucked some awful eyelid stuff into Wet Dreams, but this took me over the edge. I really cannot handle eyeball violence, and it’s proving to be a recurring motif in this festival after only three films.
Hussain (a prolific horror cinematographer who shot Hobo With a Shotgun), was one of a couple of The Theatre Bizarre directors present at the festival who introduced the film, and proudly spoke about how his idea had been “steaming in a drawer” for some time, and that he couldn’t believe he’d gotten to put it on screen. Thanks Karim!
Day One over. Mental state check: Slightly off-kilter.
Mildly renewed after some restless sleep, I head into a new American indie horror called Rogue River the next morning. This film takes a bog standard backwoods brutality set-up (young woman in trouble in the country accepts help from a kindly old couple who prove to be not so kindly) and brings very little new to the table. Once the characters true intentions are revealed, it quickly devolves into a parade of inelegant suffering. The first real stinker of my festival experience.
That evening, it’s a British film called The Glass Man, which is introduced by writer/director/co-star Christian Solimeno (who starred in Argento’s Mother of Tears) and leading man Andy Nyman, best known for comedic roles in stuff like Death at a Funeral.
In The Glass Man, Nyman plays a well-to-do Londoner whose up to his eyes in debt after being fired from his finance job, a fact he’s been concealing from his society wife (Neve Campbell, affecting a passable accent) for several months while pretending to go to work each day.
Just when his last line of credit dries up, a old burly debt collector (Games of Throne‘s Night’s Watch boss James Cosmo, who played Father Christmas in the first Chronicles of Narnia film, and was also in Braveheart) turns up at his door and offers Nyman a proposition: help him out with mysterious task that night, and he’ll forgive a particular debt.
I really liked The Glass Man. It’s a slow burn thriller that takes it’s time, but every scene is undercut with a delicious sense of foreboding, and it never feels slow. The confident, steady direction marks Solimeno as a rising British talent to watch (in addition to his acting work, he’d previously written and directed several shorts). There are big twists in The Glass Man, but my enjoyment of the film didn’t hinge on them – the primary focus here is character, and gloriously so. Nyman and Cosmo are both magnificent, and their uneasy chemistry carries the film.
The Glass Man was preceded by another short Carpenter homage, which witily riffed on the legendary blood test scene in The Thing. It was pretty cool.
I spare myself any late-night screenings for Day Two of the festival, and instead find myself witness to some true horror: Celebrity Big Brother.
Day Two over. Mental state check: Intense calm.
Day Three begins with a film I’m greatly anticipating, the buzzed about Norweigan mockumentary Troll Hunter, which many of you probably caught at the New Zealand International Film Festivals. Boy oh boy did it live up to the hype.
Presenting itself as “found footage” ala Blair Witch and Cloverfield, the film follows a trio of students making a documentary about bear attacks who encounter a mysterious man and start to follow him around the Norweigan countryside as he attempts to evade them. The man eventually relents and reveals himself to be an employee of the Troll Security Service, which is charged with curbing, controlling and covering-up evidence of Norway’s considerable troll population.
He allows the skeptical docmentarians to join him on his mission, and after a little while, they ain’t so skeptical no more.
Thrilling, hilarious and inventive in equal measure, Troll Hunter is an instant modern monster movie classic. In a cinematic age when a little CGI effort can render more or less any kind of creature possible on screen, the challenge is in creating an environment where tension can exist alongside wonder, and Troll Hunter does it magnificently. I will definitely be seeing this again.
Next up is the film I’m probably most looking forward to at FrightFest, writer/director Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Tree, the 38-years-later follow-up to his 1973 classic The Wicker Man, one of my all-time favourite horror flicks. It’s in no way a direct sequel, but more a spirtual successor that covers some of the same ground.
It stars newcomer Brittania Nicol as Beth Boothby, a Britney Spears-esque pop singer who has given up her suggestive lyrics and sexy videos and found God. As part of her becoming born again, she goes on a Christian mission to Scotland with her cowpoke boyfriend (they both wear chastity rings) to spread the word of the Lord door-to-door. But they soon encounter a local businessman (played by Rambo‘s Graham McTavish, soon to be seen as Dwalin in The Hobbit) the leader of a quaint little village, and he and his wife have plans for Beth and her beau.
There are some cool ideas in The Wicker Tree, and it was a treat seeing the 81-year-old Hardy enthusiastically introduce the film (“You’re allowed to laugh!” he said), but it’s a narrative mess, and doesn’t work as a whole. The plot often makes little sense and some of the performances were frankly dire. And there’s no sign of the uneasy ambiguity that drove the 1973 film – every plot point here is telegraphed far in advance, and there are no shocks whatsoever.
McTavish has presence, but his character is underdeveloped, and he’s a long way from the nefarious charm of Christopher Lee, who has a one-scene cameo as someone who may or may not be Lord Summerisle from The Wicker Man.
It’s not quite as tragic as the notorious Nicolas Cage remake of The Wicker Man, but it’s hard to see The Wicker Tree as anything more than a total disappointment.
With seven films gone, I am now half way through the festival. Troll Hunter has me all hopped up on the possibilities, but The Wicker Tree has shown me I should control my expecations.
Tune into next week’s blog for the remainder of my impressions and reviews for FrightFest ’11!
Me and Kim Newman, one of my film critic idols!
