There is macabre beauty in every frame of Where the Devil Roams, the latest offbeat horror from the Adams family.
The film was co-directed and co-written by its three lead actors – Toby Poser, John Adams and Zelda Adams – who are also a family. The same team made last year’s Hellbender and 2020’s The Deeper You Dig, among others.
Like their earlier efforts, Where the Devil Roams concerns itself with life on the fringes, rock music, and the family dynamic.
Their latest follows a sideshow act, a family. They perform unusual songs sung by their daughter Eve (Zelda Adams), who is, outside of these songs, entirely mute. But the act isn’t bringing in much lately, and as they move from town to town, sometimes Maggie’s temper or sense of justice means blood – even limbs, on occasion – will be spilled.
The family’s lived-in quality benefits the film. As they move from farmhouse to farmhouse, sideshow to riverbend, their tics and quirks meet acceptance born of familiarity. It not only anchors the bizarre nature of the film in authenticity, but creates a tenderness that makes you root for the family no matter their actions.
Poser continues to be a force. She compels your attention, carving out a character that’s vulnerable and strong, insecure, brutish and tender.
The ensemble convinces, particularly the sideshow performers, but the film’s most enduring charm is its vintage portrait look. It’s a gorgeous movie, the filmmakers creating the beautifully seedy atmosphere ideal to the era and setting.
Where the Devil Roams feels expansive and open, but like anything else in the sideshow, that’s all trickery. There’s more happening in this film than they let on, which is why the final act feels simultaneously “a ha!” and “WTF?!”
You won’t see it coming, but in retrospect, it was there all along.
Nat Rovit has obviously seen a few American films of the 1970s. His award-winning horror short Honeymoon at Cold Hollow could not nail the aesthetic more precisely if it had been filmed in ’74 and held in a vault until this year.
Honeymooners David (Russ Russo) and Mary (Jessie Paddock) traverse the wintry Vermont mountainside en route to their romantic cabin getaway. Like so many genre film heroes taking their chances in an isolated cabin, they are warned. It seems there was recently some trouble with a married couple, the husband going mad and all…
Mary nods empathetically. David seems…uncomfortable. But on they drive, the perfect, wilting and crackling era-appropriate score accompanying them through the snow toward their little slice of heaven. Si Begg’s musical composition even follows the lovers through their pitch-perfect Seventies romance montage.
Rovit’s film turns from syrupy to sinister with an unexpectedly funny image. The filmmaker mines Seventies cinema for its frustrating logical lapses as well as its loose and gorgeous aesthetic. Kudos to cinematographer John de Menil – this is one of the most gorgeous short films you’ll see, whether external shots of endless winter or the eerie, almost glowing tunnel of snow.
Russo and especially Paddock mirror the performance style that suits the overall time period tone Rovit so expertly develops, and by the time their brief story reaches its conclusion, you’re reminded again just how strangely beautiful blood can be when it slaps against snow.
There is a mystery at the heart of Mister Organ, the new documentary from David Farrier that is compelling and maddening. As with Farrier’s last feature film, the highly acclaimed (and equally eccentric) Tickled, the filmmaker finds himself personally caught up in a seamy underbelly that touches up ever so slightly against the real world, and it’s impossible to see things the same way afterward.
But in the same way that the subculture of Tickled opened itself up to be larger than expected, Mister Organ is like a funhouse mirror opposite. Each step of Farrier’s investigation draws him further and further into the strange and sinister world of one Michael Organ.
In the best possible way, Mister Organ does not seem like the documentary Farrier wanted to make. It starts with a shady but quasi-legal towing scheme in the parking lot of an Auckland antiques store. Farrier’s spotlight on the extortionary fees being levied in this private parking lot make enough waves in local news to lead to political action around towing rules.
Unable to help himself, Farrier pulls at some small inconsistent threads and a possible connection between the tow driver and the shop owner. A few lawsuits, some light larceny and a possible home break-in later, and Farrier’s entire life is consumed by his investigation into the driver—Michael Organ.
A parade of former roommates, acquaintances and even family members suggests that Organ is, at best, a mercurial and deeply unpleasant man. And at worst, he may be an abusive con artist who has harassed people to suicide. (Allegedly! Organ’s penchant for lawsuits is a key part of the film. And Farrier is still dealing with court cases from Organ.)
There’s no real mystery about Organ himself. He is the man you think he is—a manipulative brute with the money to enact his cruelties on anyone unlucky enough to come into his orbit.
The enthralling mystery at the heart of Mister Organ instead is the way Farrier so thoroughly establishes that there is nothing there to Organ—he calls him a “black hole” at one point—while being unable to stop himself from getting caught up in the man’s grievances.
Organ’s mental state, while not something anyone would classify as “solid,” isn’t all that interesting. Farrier offers up half-baked insights on Organ near the end of the movie as a sort of a-ha moment, but the real climax has been Farrier himself slowly losing sanity points while locked in Organ’s sick games for years on end.
The character study is one of the director, not Organ, and the depths to which a man’s soul can be broken when it comes into contact with a relentless force that is tuned a few degrees toward evil but with the impish sadism to maintain plausible deniability. Is it rude to make a feature documentary about a non-public figure only to conclude that he’s a real-life Lovecraftian horror put on earth to torment people? Probably. But spending just 90 minutes with Mister Organ is enough to inspire gratitude to Farrier for the public service.
Based on a true story, writer/director David Wagner’s Eismayer explores themes of repression and masculinity.
Our introduction to Sergeant Major Eismayer (Gerhard Liebmann), notorious hardass, is a conversation in the bathroom between several Austrian soldiers giving newest recruit Falak (Luka Dimic) a lesson in the man’s terrorizing behavior.
When we meet the Sergeant Major himself, he oversees a locker inspection and harasses Falak. He is strict and cruel and the talk from the previous scene has not been exaggerated.
At home, he is affectionate with his son, but there is tension between him and his wife. As the film unfolds, a fight between Falak and another soldier reveals that Falak is gay. This puts new pressure on Falak, as well as Eismayer.
Though Eismayer’s coldness and cruelty could be written off as a reaction to his self-repression, the film doesn’t rest on such a simple explanation. His attitude isn’t just about his homosexuality, but his ideas about what it means to be both a man and a soldier.
Liebmann excels. He brings multiple facets to what could be a simplistic or stereotypical portrayal. Dimic initially has less to work with. However, as the film unfolds, the two characters begin to dance around the complexity of their situation.
More of the film’s underlying tensions would come across with a robust knowledge of Austria’s history and culture, including the implications of Falak’s Yugoslavian background. But there’s no missing the discrimination he faces.
Even as Austria and the army move forward, there are some that would hold both back. Eismayer, himself, resists change, even as he’s pushed toward accepting himself for who he is. That men and women still fear repercussions for embracing who they are is both heartbreaking and infuriating. It’s why stories like Eismayer’s still need to be told.
There have been a lot of movies that tread the same water as 15 Cameras: true crime, new homes, unannounced cameras, creepy guys, basements – among them, Victor Zarcoff’s 2015 thriller 13 Cameras.
I didn’t hold out a lot of hope for this one, honestly, but director Danny Madden (no relation), working from a fine script by PJ McCabe (co-star of 13 Cameras and writer of the criminally underseen The Beta Test), layers themes and ideas to develop a rich picture of villainy.
There’s a little hitch to the starter home recently purchased by Sky (Angela Wong Carbone) and Cam (The Wolf of Snow Hollow’s Will Madden, also no relation to me, but he is the director’s brother). They got the duplex pretty cheap, but that’s because the former owner is the famous Slumlord from a popular true crime show (full of footage from 13 Cameras), who’d wired all his homes up with many cameras, watched victims to get their habits down, then kidnapped and killed at will.
Sky can’t get enough of the show. She binges it, finishes it, and binges it again. It’s a huge turnoff for her ignored husband, and more than a little creepy to her sister Carolyn (Hilty Bowen), who’s crashing while she tries to get a restraining order against her ex.
And there you have it: one location (duplex), a handful of characters (those mentioned plus two tenants), and a found footage/true crime sensibility. Efficient, logical, but never boring and though inevitable, rarely truly predictable.
The slyest thing about 15 Cameras is the way it shows the distance between nice guy, abusive boyfriend and all out monster in inches. By keeping us with Cam’s perspective, that continuum takes on an even more powerful feel.
Will Madden does a fine job of developing an uncomfortable, believable arc for Cam. Likewise, Carbone allows her character enough space to be occasionally unlikeable, while often quite tender.
Indeed, all the performances have texture and depth, even those that might have been considered throwaways in other horror flicks. (Shout out to a very brief but memorable turn from Jim Cummings.) And the storyteller in Danny Madden knows how this should play out.
There’s nothing groundbreaking about 15 Cameras, but what it does, it does well.
This year’s animated features have already wowed us with spiders and turtles, so why not monkeys?
Netflix gives it a go with the latest take on a well-loved story from Chinese literature, landing scattershot moments of humor and visual flair amid a rambling narrative grasping for anything to call its own.
Our titular Monkey King (voiced by Jimmy O. Yang) is on a quest, too. After being born from a magical rock, his exuberance and ambition gets him exiled from his village for being an agent of chaos. The Immortals in Heaven insist on the rules of balance, and the little Monkey King just cannot follow them.
But Buddha himself (BD Wong) intercedes, telling the Jade Emperor (Hoon Lee) that a great destiny awaits the Monkey King. And once he is able to steal “Stick” (Nan Li), the all-powerful Grand Column of the undersea Dragon King (Bowen Yang), Monkey King sets out to vanquish 100 demons and earn his place among the highest Immortals.
The writing team of Rita Hsiao (Mulan, Toy Story 2), and Steve Bencich and Ron J. Friedman (Open Season, Brother Bear) sets effective stakes early on, but then struggles to give the tale an emotional anchor. We never really care that Monkey King is not being accepted because he doesn’t seem interested in earning it, even tossing aside the help of the earnest Lin (Jolie Haong-Rappaport), a wannabe assistant who he feels is beneath him.
Director Anthony Stacchi (Open Season, The Boxtrolls) gives the film an often frantic pace that doesn’t leave much room to breath. And when an action sequence or punch line does land, we’re quickly off to the next distraction, which is especially distracting when it’s an awkward musical number for the Dragon King that you’d swear was an A.I. re-working of The Little Mermaid’s “Poor Unfortunate Souls.”
There are pluses, including a wonderful voice cast, a vibrant, culturally rich animation pastiche and winking nods to the work of executive producer Stephen Chow (Kung Fu Hustle, Shaolin Soccer). But disjointed character arcs and muddled motivations keep the film from crafting a coherent journey. and The Monkey King can never quite escape the chaos.
One of our favorite parts of the trauma of accepting that half the year is behind us is our therapy of celebrating so much great horror cinema! Did you forget these treasures? Already?! Well, here are (in alphabetical order) the ten best horror flicks so far this year.
The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster
An awful lot of people have reimagined Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein in an awful lot of ways. What makes writer/director Bomani J. Story’s take, The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster, so effective is that it tackles a lot in very little time and handles all of it heartbreakingly well.
To say that Story situates Shelley’s tale in the context of drug violence would be to sell his film short. He’s moved the story from European castles and laboratories to the projects, where Vicaria’s (Laya DeLeon Hayes, stunning) mother fell victim to a drive-by shooting, her brother was shot to death on a drug deal gone wrong, and her father deals with his grief by using. But drugs are just part of the larger problem, the almost escapable, systemic and cyclical nature of violence and poverty.
Story’s chosen genre may feel slight, even campy, but the tropes belie some densely packed ideas, and there’s a current of empathy running through the film that not only separates this from other Frankenstein tales, but deepens the film’s genuine sense of tragedy.
The Blackening
Several friends from college (including Jay Pharaoh, Yvonne Orji, Sinqua Walls, Antoinette Robertson, and the film’s co-writer Dewayne Perkins) are reuniting at a remote cabin for a Juneteenth celebration. It isn’t long before they discover a talking blackface at the center of a board game called The Blackening (“probably runs on racism!”) and fall into a sadistic killer’s plan to pick them off one by one.
The game will test their knowledge of Black history and culture, and demand they sacrifice the friend they deem “the Blackest.” It’s a clever device that Perkins, co-writer Tracy Oliver and director Tim Story use to skewer both well-known horror tropes and well-worn identity politicking.
The old joke about Black people being the first to die in horror films is pretty well-worn, too, but don’t let that poster tagline convince you that the film has nothing new to say. The less “Blacker” these characters seem, the greater chance they have of surviving. That’s some fertile ground for social commentary, and what began as a viral comedy sketch lands on the screen as a refreshing new angle for a horror comedy.
Evil Dead Rise
Deadites hit the big city in Lee Cronin’s Evil Dead Rise, the latest instalment in the old Sam Raimi demon possession franchise. As was true with its predecessors, blood will rain, viscera will spew, chainsaws will bite, and the dead will most definitely rise.
We open, as usual, on a cabin. Despite the top-notch title sequence, though, this episode will not be a cabin-in-the-woods horror. Cronin, who’s credited with the script as well, takes the Necronomicon and all its secrets into an urban high rise to see what hell he can raise.
Cronin uses disorienting angels and shots throughout the film to beautifully bewildering effect. A fisheye-of-death through a peephole is just one of the film’s many horrifying highlights.
Huesera: The Bone Woman
Michelle Garza Cervera’s maternal nightmare is bright and decisive, pulling in common genre tropes only long enough to grant entrance to the territory of a central metaphor before casting them aside for something sinister, honest and honestly terrifying.
While it toes certain familiar ground – the gaslighting of Rosemary’s Baby, for instance – what sets Huesera apart from other maternal horror is its deliberate untidiness. Cervera refuses to embrace the good mother/bad mother dichotomy and disregards the common cinematic journey of convincing a woman that all she really wants is to be a mom.
Huesera’s metaphor is brave and timely. Brave not only because of its LGBTQ themes but because of its motherhood themes. It’s a melancholy and necessary look at what you give up, what you kill.
Infinity Pool
Brandon Cronenberg + Mia Goth + Alexander Skarsgård … for a very specific set of people, the sum there is hell yes.
Riding our favorite wave in horror – that rich people are unspeakably diabolical – writer/director Cronenberg takes us on a strange journey through privilege, debauchery, entitlement, boredom, narcissism, psychotropic drugs and more in his trippy new flick, Infinity Pool.
Cronenberg’s ultimate concept is clearly, wildly his own, but moments sometimes call to mind ideas from last year’s Speak No Evil, as well as Society, Kill List, Hour of the Wolf, and A Serbian Film (no, not that part). Still, the film never feels borrowed. Uncomfortable, yes. Borrowed? No.
Influencer
Kurtis David Harder’s approach to influencer horror leans Neo-noir thriller as the cold and calculating CW (Cassandra Naud – outstanding) spins a dangerous web for an unsuspecting social butterfly.
Harder and cinematographer David Schuurman create an absolutely gorgeous pot for boiling this mystery. From atop deserted island beaches to below crystal clear waters and inside lavish vacation homes, Harder’s nimble camera and visual aesthetics reinforce the notion that pretty pictures don’t always tell the whole story.
With sharp dialogue, skillful plotting and simmering dread, Influencer is plenty worthy of that “Like” button.
Malum
Equal parts Assault on Precinct 13 and The Shining by way of Charles Manson, Anthony DiBlasi’s Malum is a quick, mean, mad look into the abyss.
DiBlasi is reimagining his own 2014 flick Last Shift, although it feels more like a riff on Carpenter’s 1976 Precinct 13 than anything. Regardless, what the filmmaker does is confine the audience along with our hero in a diabolical funhouse.
Malum gets nuts, exactly as it should. Though it never feels genuinely unique, it manages to avoid feeling derivative because of DiBlasi’s commitment to the grisly madness afoot. The result is a solid, blood soaked bit of genre entertainment fully worthy of your 92 minutes.
M3GAN
Hilarious. Gerard Johnstone – whose 2014 horror gem Housebound is a must see – displays a sly instinct for humor in a film that understands what’s creepy about dolls and toxic relationships.
Allison Williams is solid as the workaholic who just wasn’t cut out to be a parent. That would be fine, except her orphaned niece could really use a parent, not an AI caregiver whose rushed-to-production programming and unseemly backstory make her dangerous in, let’s be honest, a pretty fun way.
You remember that trailer. We could have used more dancing, but when M3GAN plays “Toy Soldiers” on the piano, we were already hooked.
Renfield
They totally made a movie with a very saucy Nic Cage as Dracula. And a saucy Nic Cage is the best Nic Cage.
There’s at least one bloody toe in waters that send up rom-coms, satirize narcissistic relationships and homage a classic horror character while it’s also modernizing the themes that built him.
But experiencing Count Nicula alone is worth it. Plus, Nicholas Hoult is perfect as the put-upon sad boy with access to anti-hero superpowers and Awkwafina can wring plenty of humor from simply telling a guy named Kyle to F-off.
Renfield might be bloodier than you expect, but it’s just as much fun as you’re hoping for. Call it bloody good fun.
Skinamarink
There’s probably some version of this nightmare in your past. You were just a kid, separated from your parents and trying in vain to reach them or call out for help, or maybe just escape.
Remember how scared you were? Director Kyle Edward Ball and cinematographer Jamie McRae do, and they twist that knife again and again for 100 minutes of dark, disorienting dread.
Cinematography and sound design are intertwined in an analog, cathode-ray aesthetic that recalls vintage, grainy VHS. Two children whisper to each other (“Where do you think Dad is? I don’t know.”) as they wander from room to room, with Ball’s camera never allowing you one second of relief.
How is this year half over?! Well, whether we want to believe it or not, it is. That means a look back at the movies that most impressed us over the course of the first six months. Here, in alphabetical order, are our favorites.
Air
If you still need proof that Ben Affleck is a damn fine director, you’ll find it, right down to how he frames the multiple telephone conversations. But the real surprise here is the script. In a truly sparkling debut, writer Alex Convery brings history to life with an assured commitment to character.
And much like his success with the Oscar-winning Argo, Affleck proves adept at a pace and structure that wrings tension from an outcome we already know. In fact, he goes one better this time, inserting archival footage that actually reminds us of how this all turned out, before leaving Mrs. Jordan’s final ultimatum hanging in the air like a levitating slam from Michael.
Asteroid City
As is so often the case, director Wes Anderson, writing again with Roman Coppola, painstakingly creates a world – colorful, peculiar, emotionally tight lipped – brimming with characters (equally colorful, peculiar and emotionally tight-lipped). Brimming. About 50 speaking characters stand or sit precisely on their mark, perfectly framed, each one doing their all to keep chaos at bay.
The wordplay is succinct and witty per usual, dancing through themes of science, art, and Cold War paranoia. But while Anderson’s last film, The French Dispatch, left its procession of indelibly offbeat characters to fend for themselves, this time they’re connected with the sterile humanity that buoys the best of his work.
Blackberry
So, a voice on the line says, “You have a collect call from ‘What the f%& is happening’!”
That’s not really the caller’s name.
He’s actually Jim Balsillie (a terrific Glenn Howerton), co-CEO of BlackBerry Limited, and he’s having yet another temper tantrum. The pairing of Balsillie’s bare-knuckled business sense with the tech genius of other CEO Mike Lazaridis (Jay Baruchel, perfectly awkward) made the company an early leader in the cell phone game, but things have started to unravel. Fast.
The colliding of worlds is engaging enough, but the delightfully sharp humor and first-rate ensemble (also including Michael Ironside) turn these based on true events into a rollicking, can’t-look-away slice of history.
John Wick: Chapter 4
Chapter 4 is not just more of what makes the series memorable, it’s better: better action, better cinematography, better fight choreography, better framing and shot selection. Sandwiched between inspired carnage are brief moments of exposition set within sumptuous visions of luxury and decadence. This movie is absolutely gorgeous.
One of the reasons each episode of this franchise surpasses the last is that the franchise is not exactly about John Wick. It’s a love letter to a canon, a song about the entire history of onscreen assassins and their honorable, meticulous action. Genre legends arrive and we accept a backstory that isn’t detailed or necessary because the actors carry their cinematic history with them, and that’s backstory enough.
It’s hard to believe it took this many sequels to get us to John Wick v Donnie Yen, but it was worth the wait.
Linoleum
If you haven’t gotten to know filmmaker Colin West, it’s high time you correct that. The writer/director follows up last year’s surreal Christmas haunting Double Walker with a beautiful look at living a fantastic life.
The effortlessly affable Jim Gaffigan plays Cameron, an astronomer in suburban Dayton, Ohio hitting a very rocky path in his middle age. The kiddie show about science that he hosts is failing. Maybe his marriage is, too. New neighbors, a mysterious woman, and increasingly bizarre events have got him wondering. What does it all mean?
Return to Seoul
In Return to Seoul (Retour à Séoul), a trip “home” becomes a catalyst for one woman’s search for identity, as director and co-writer Davy Chou crafts a relentlessly engrossing study of character and culture.
In her screen debut, Park Ji-min is simply a revelation. Her experience as a visual artist clearly assists Park in realizing how to challenge the camera in a transfixing manner that implores us not to give up on her character. Her Freddie is carrying a soul-deep wound and pushes people away with a sometimes casual cruelty, but Park always grounds her with humanity and restraint.
Freddie begins to embody the typhoon that pushed her toward this journey of self, and Return to Seoul becomes an always defiant, sometimes bristling march to emotional release. And when that release comes, it is a rich and moving reward for a filmmaker, a performer, and all who choose to follow.
Showing Up
Visual poet of the day-to-day Kelly Reichardt returns to screens with a look at art as well as craft in her dramedy, Showing Up.
Michelle Williams is characteristically amazing, her performance as much a piece of physical acting as verbal. You know Lizzy by looking at her, at the way she stands, the way she responds to requests for coffee or work, the way she reacts to compliments about her work, the way she sighs. Williams’s performance is as much in what she does not say as what she does, and the honesty in that performance generates most of the film’s comic moments.
Chau knocks it out of the park yet again, and like Williams, she presents the character of Jo as much in her physical action as in her dialog. The chemistry between the two is truly amazing, simultaneously combative and accepting, or maybe just resigned to each other.
Like Nicole Holofcener and Claire Denis, Reichardt invests her attention in the small moments rather than delivering a tidy, obvious structure. The result feels messy, like life, with lengths of anxiety and unease punctuated by small triumphs.
Sisu
Is there anything in all the world more satisfying than watching Nazis die? Perhaps not. Jalmari Helander, the genius behind 2010’s exceptional holiday horror Rare Exports, squeezes a lovechild from Leone and Peckinpah by way of Tarantino (natch). The result, Sisu, a kind of WWII-era Scandinavian John Wick.
Helander’s confident vision meshes majestically with the cinematography of Kjell Lagerroos, capturing the lonesome beauty of Lapland in one minute, the next minute bursting with the frenetic energy and viscera of action. The stunt choreography and editing in the dizzying array of carnage-laden set pieces are breathtaking. Knives, guns, fisticuffs, tank fire, regular fire, land mines, a hanging, airplanes – a seemingly endless string of magnificently crafted violent action keeps the pace breathless.
Clocking in at just 91 minutes, Sisu is perfectly lean, relentlessly mean, and consistently satisfying at every blood-soaked turn.
Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse
A reminder that multiverse films can, indeed, be made well, this story is wild but never illogical, delivering a heady balance of quantum physics, Jungian psychology and pop culture homages while rarely feeling like a self-congratulatory explosion of capitalism. Heart strings are tugged, and it helps if you’ve seen the previous installment. (If you haven’t, that’s on you, man. Rectify that situation immediately.)
A star studded voice cast shines, but that wattage is almost outshone by the animation. Every conceivable style, melding one scene to the next, bringing conflict, love and heroism to startling, vivid, utterly gorgeous life.
If there is a drawback (and judging the reaction of some of the youngsters in my screening, there may be), it’s that Across the Spider-Verse is a cliffhanger. If you’re cool with an amazing second act in a three-story arc (The Empire Strikes Back, The Two Towers), you’ll probably be OK with it. Maybe warn your kids, but don’t let it dissuade you from taking in this animated glory on the biggest screen you can find.
You Hurt My Feelings
One of filmmaker Nicole Holofcener’s great talents is acknowledging within a film that there is no reason to feel for her characters, and then making you feel for the characters. She’s a master of the relatable if tedious angst of the privileged. In her hands, these primarily insignificant tensions are humanized and often hilarious.
Julia Louis-Dreyfus, who was so magnificently flawed and empathetic in Holofcener’s 2013 film Enough Said, stars as Beth, a novelist. Well, she wants to be a novelist, but her memoir only did OK and now her agent doesn’t seem that thrilled with her first ever novel. Maybe it sucks?
No, supportive-to-a-fault husband and psychologist Don (Tobias Menzies) assures her. But secretly, honestly, maybe that’s not how he feels.
Thanks to these two excellent performances the filmmaker delivers her finest moments, creating a lived-in world, a true microcosm that pokes fun at our insecurities and the little white lies that keep us happy.
An instinct for sound design, a grasp of the difference between telling a story and reading a story – this is the power of Aisha. The piece of short fiction performance leaves you with the impression of your own heart racing, a sense of place and sound, of scent and feeling.
Co-creators Cory Choy and Feyiṣayo Aluko deliver a brief but complete story. We live Aisha’s nightmare with her, hear what she hears, feel what she feels – the breath on her neck, the shrinking claustrophobia of a tunnel, the stench of the bodies, the nightmare of the woman in the blue hijab. As evocative and true as any nightmare while it happens, the story brims with imagery and metaphor without succumbing to either.
In telling the story the way they do, the authors ask you to become Aisha, a powerful way to pull listeners into an unknown world and make them feel part of it. Frightening without being truly horror, the poetry in the storytelling echoes a primal terror of loss of self while imagery places that terror within the misery of war. And yet, tantalizingly, it’s Aisha’s waking moments at the tail end of the story that feel most genuinely frightening.
The Tribeca winner for Best Independent Audio Fiction promises a fascinating character to follow on a longer journey.
I imagine a lot of people have thought about getting out of a bad marriage and wondered, What’s the worst that could happen?
Those people should talk to Samantha Kolesnik and Bryan Smith. Or maybe they shouldn’t. The duo’s unusual A-side/B-side horror tale Beleth Station is like a premise wrapped in a dare that really digs into What’s the worst that could happen?
Both writers take the same set of characters, same basic idea of being trapped in a dying town off the Pennsylvania highway, and then each sees how bad it can get.
Kolesnik’s take, A Night to Remember, comes first, following Krista and Nick as they flee Krista’s stultifying marriage. They find themselves in need of roadside assistance in an isolated stretch – a common enough beat in horror, but one that Kolesnik takes in depraved and alarming directions. What follows is an experiment in degradation.
There is a deep hopelessness in this story, a kind of grim poetry that’s so beautifully written you commit to the long, bleak, terrifying haul. You will want to look away, but Kolesnik’s prose compels you.
Both stories explore the primal terror of helplessness, each wallowing in the evil that men do, each almost mocking the naivete of faith in the human condition. Still, they are vastly different tales. Smith’s The Gauntlet feels more cinematic, like Herschell Gordon Lewis’s Two Thousand Maniacs meets Stephen King’s The Running Man.
Conspiracy, brutality, revolution all fuel a tale that drops you in the middle of the action and never lets up. Two desperate pairs – young townies dying for escape, new lovers lured in from the outside – commit increasingly horrendous acts to garner freedom.
For Smith, the question isn’t how bad can it get as much as how far will you go, and what will you be when it’s over? He has a flair for both imagery and pace that makes The Gauntlet all but impossible to stop reading.
