Thrilled to be asked by Nightmares Film Festival to interview filmmaker Natalie James. The Relic director talks about the transition from shorts—like her NFF winning Creswick—to features.
Tag Archives: horror movies
Bottle Feeding
The Empty Man
by George Wolf
Okay, so here’s the story: if you’re on a bridge at night and blow into an empty bottle, you’ll conjure the Empty Man. And in three days, he’ll find you.
Right, so it’s a bit of Candyman, some of The Ring, lots of jump scares and kills for Halloween, got it.
I don’t think you do…unless you’ve read Cullen Bunn’s graphic novels.
Writer/director David Prior adapts the series with James Badge Dale in the lead as James, an ex-cop still grieving from the loss of his wife and son. When the daughter of his good friend Nora (Marin Ireland) goes missing, James sidesteps the local Missouri cops for a rogue investigation of his own.
Prior, a video vet making his feature debut, lays down an atmosphere that gets plenty creepy, but seldom horrific. As James digs in, the film becomes a dark mystery, one full of freaky cult members with aspirations of total consciousness and malevolent chaos.
Dale keeps your interest with a terrific performance full of wounded determination, getting solid support from Ireland (plus Stephen Root in a memorable cameo).
But at nearly two hours and twenty minutes, it’s a bit too much of wandering slog in need of a leaner path.
Come in looking for a tidy little slasher, and you’re going to be disappointed. But if you’re down for a dark and moody rumination on grief, metaphysics and itchy brains, you could conjure up worse than The Empty Man.
Casa de los Muertos
32 Malasaña Street
by Hope Madden
What is it about haunted houses that always sucker in big families? We saw it in The Conjuring and The Amityville Horror before it. And now another big old clan is about to regret that bargain dream house over at 32 Malasaña Street.
Albert Pintó’s nightmare follows the Olmedos, who take their two teenagers, their 5-year-old, an aging grandfather, and their shame to Madrid, leaving the country and their old lives behind. But haunted houses smell shame and secrets, don’t the Olmedos know that?
Pintó creates a dreadful, dreamy quality to the haunting, every shot’s framing and color, light and shadow taking on a painterly quality. He conjures a mood, a vintage era where hope and freedom bumped up against tradition and oppression.
The film is set in 1976, and like those other films of dream homes gone wrong, Malasaña creates concrete tension. The first response to any haunting is to just get the F out, but where are you supposed to take three kids and an elderly father? Where’s abuela supposed to plug in his C-Pap? The “down to our last penny and nowhere to go” vibe feels authentic under these circumstances.
But Pintó seems out to do more with the size of the family than simply convince you that thre’s nowhere to go. 17-year-old Amparo (Begoña Vargas) dreams of becoming a flight attendant, of flying up and away from this life, but the house itself is the metaphor for the family as a trap.
Faith and culture beget big families and poverty, and old-fashioned thinking creates monsters.
Where Pintó takes the metaphor is less inspired than it might be. Troublingly, the filmmaker’s throwback vibe retains that old horror trope of the physically disabled character as conduit to the supernatural, and enlightened lip service can’t excuse the way the film falls back on cliches of the monstrous “other.”
32 Malasaña Street sets complicated characters in motion within a familiar world. It just doesn’t use them to tell us anything new.
Freedom Is Slavery
The Antenna
by Rachel Willis
The installation of a state-sponsored satellite dish on the roof of an apartment building is the inciting event for ominous, Orwellian horror in writer/director Orçun Behram’s first feature, The Antenna.
A commentary on the political situation in modern day Turkey, Behram’s debut film is focused on oppression. Though oppression takes many forms (the oppression of youth, the patriarchy, the status quo), the movie is most interested in the state’s suppression of speech and expression.
From the moment the satellite is fitted onto the roof of the building, sinister events occur. A black ooze, which emanates from the antenna, leaks through the walls, something Mehmet (Ihsan Önal), the building’s evening landlord, discovers when he’s called to a tenant’s bathroom to address the seeping goo.
The ooze creeps through the building, infiltrating more and more apartments as the night progresses toward the launch of the new state-run programming.
The kick-off event for the state’s broadcasting system is the “Midnight Broadcast.” Building superintendent, Mr. Cihan, has been advertising it to all the residents to ensure maximum audience participation. The Leader (who bears a certain resemblance to Recep Erdoğan) hosts the broadcast, and while the Leader’s delivery seems benevolent, the underlying message is a sinister reminder that dissent will not be tolerated.
Helping to tie the film’s many many pieces together is Mehmet. As odd and menacing events happen in the hours leading up to the Midnight Broadcast, he becomes increasingly invested in the fates of the residents in his building. Mehmet experiences a few disturbing visual and auditory assaults, all of which propel him to action.
The black ooze is a not-so-subtle metaphor for the insidious nature of state propaganda. But when you want to deliver a warning to your audience, knocking them over the head with the message is sometimes worth doing.
There is a lot working for Behram’s film. As we watch the events unfold, dialogue between characters is replaced by broadcasts from a threatening voice that emanates from every radio and TV. The tense score puts you on edge, and the climax is almost unbearably stressful as the auditory assaults reach their peak.
This is a reminder of what’s at stake when you take your freedom for granted in a world that seeks to rob you of it at every turn.
And Feathered
Tar
by George Wolf
It takes a good while to get to the creature in this creature feature, but that’s hardly the most misplayed hand in Tar. It isn’t until the last few minutes that the film serves up the kind of winky-winky that would have gone a long way toward saving it.
A group of employees in an office building above L.A.’s old La Brea Tar Pits is under a tight deadline to clear out. The smarmy landlord is evicting them all with one day’s notice, and they have to be gone by 6am or face a big penalty. Then of course the building’s power is cut mid-move, but there are bigger, messier problems.
Underground construction work on the subway expansion has awakened La Brea’s Matchi Manitou, and it ain’t happy.
Director/co-writer/co-star Aaron Wolf gets Timothy Bottoms and Graham Greene to head up his cast, which is good for the poster but bad for the rest of the actors who can’t keep up.
Wolf employs a narrative structure heavy on flashback, and the moments of tension that manage to avoid that roadblock are awkward and clearly telegraphed.
The ensemble of evacuees/possible victims (including Emily Peachy, Sandy Danto, Tiffany Shepis and Nicole Alexandra Shipley) has the depth and logic to only reinforce the point of that horror spoof Geico ad. And after about 90 minutes, the film’s eureka moment makes you wonder about the Drive-In pleasure Tar might have been if it hadn’t waited so long to tap a self-aware vein.
See How High She Flies
The Curse of Audrey Earnshaw
by Hope Madden
Who’s the villain?
A vampire didn’t choose that destiny, nor the zombie, nor even the werewolf. All three are victims of fate.
The witch, however, comes to her dark powers by choice. And maybe – as Robert Eggers pointed out in his 2015 masterpiece The VVitch—that choice might even make some sense.
Since Eggers’s beguiling horror show, a number of filmmakers have joined him in his ruminations. Lukas Fiegelfeld’s mesmerizing 2017 debut Hagazussa and Luca Guadagnino’s 2018 feminist reprise of Suspiria represent the strongest among the resulting films.
Few if any will ever tell the tale so powerfully or so well as Eggers, but writer/director Thomas Robert Lee has a go with The Curse of Audrey Earnshaw. His film is interested in women’s agency, their oddness, what they owe, what they should and shouldn’t be deciding for themselves, and what they are willing to sacrifice.
It’s August of 1973, but it could just as easily be the 1950s or the 1880s. (So why 1973? It was a big year in women’s rights, after all.) A rugged woman, isolated from the nearby religious community, stands silhouetted against her barn, ax and woodpile.
She is Agatha Earnshaw (Catherine Walker), and she has a secret.
Things haven’t been right in the village since the eclipse 17 years back, but things have been especially troubling lately. Agatha has the only farm that’s producing, the only animals that haven’t taken sick.
Performances are wonderful in a film that looks rustic and spooky, creating a time out of time. Walker, who was so effective in the wonderful little Irish horror Dark Song, cuts an impressive figure of maternal ferocity. She’s orbited by consistently impressive turns, whether the sincere pastor (Sean McGinley), entitled patriarch (Tom Carey), distraught husband (Jared Abrahamson), or young woman finding her voice (Jessica Reynolds).
Each man, however sympathetic or compassionate, represents danger. Like a lot of horror films, The Curse of Audrey Earnshaw is a coming-of-age cautionary tale: fear the power of womanhood. But Lee is careful to keep asking who, exactly, is the villain here?
The direction is too often obvious: a cough, a handkerchief, blood. At other times, cinematic choices betray the film’s low budget. The Curse of Audrey Earnshaw will never reach the ranks of classic, but it makes a lot of bold choices and leaves an impression.
A Wicker Man Vacation
Death of Me
by Seth Troyer
From director Darren Lynn Bousman (Saw II-IV, Repo: The Genetic Opera) comes a vacation horror romp that will bring you some thrills and chills. Nothing more, nothing less.
The highlight here is certainly the gorgeous island setting, which is a welcome departure from haunted houses and summer camps with bad reputations.
The panic begins when a vacationing couple (Maggie Q, Luke Hemsworth) on a remote island realizes they remember nothing from the previous night. The rather chilling race to get answers showcases some intense visuals and surreal editing techniques that help add excitement to the predictable—if surprisingly brutal—twists.
If you are a full on horror fanatic, you will probably have at least a decent time here. The film breaks no new ground but it hits its marks rather decently. The whole, “everybody knows whats going on except you” set up owes a lot to classics such as Rosemary’s Baby and The Wicker Man.
It’s also not hard to imagine that the success of Midsommar was a factor in greenlighting this film. It similarly attempts to incorporate a modern theme or two, including a very light commentary on consent and free will, which if fleshed out a bit more could have added some potency and depth.
Also sorry to be that guy, but in 2020, do we really need another film where island natives are portrayed as little more than villains who delight in the torture of the “civilized” Americans? It’s a hypothetical question, the answer is: no, probably not.
What Death of Me lacks in originality it sometimes makes up for with intense visual flourishes and dream sequences, but by the third or fourth “was it a dream or did it really happen?” moment, the horrific scenes begin to lose their sense of danger and traumatic permanence. Because of this, the film starts to flounder a bit in the middle section, just before we reach the rather satisfying, bloody climax.
It’s way off course from being a masterpiece, but for fans of the genre stuck inside during these COVID-19 days, you could do worse than this film that teleports you to a beautiful island for a few bloody thrills.
Do the Work
Scare Me
by Hope Madden
Writer’s block—it is a common theme in all writing, especially horror. Think about The Shining, for example. Fred (writer/director/star Josh Ruben) certainly is. And at first, writer’s block is what the writer/director in Ruben leads you to believe Scare Me is all about.
Fred takes a cab to a wintry cabin. He tries to dodge questions from his driver, who, like Fred, fancies herself a bit of a writer. A short time later, Fred stares at a laptop screen. He’s not typing.
A power outage and a chance encounter with “real writer” Fanny (Aya Cash) lead to an evening of telling scary stories. And just like that stormy night so long ago when Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley out-storied her companions Percy Shelley and Lord Byron, the male ego is more easily wounded than any fictional character.
At its best, Scare Me offers an intriguing look inside the mind of privilege. What is it like to be a decent-looking white guy who has to resolve himself to the fact that he actually has no claim to that top spot on the totem pole that he’s always been told is his?
At its worst, it’s an overlong bit of self-indulgence.
As Fred’s nemesis/love interest(?)/frenemy Fanny, Cash is straightforward, merciless, funny and full of insight—as is Ruben’s script. Scare Me has no time for entitled, lazy writers.
For any of the real tensions of the film to work, we have to recognize and, to a degree, empathize with—even root for—Fred. Thanks to a smart script and an eerily recognizable performance, we do.
Ruben does an excellent job of wading those familiar waters, sort of likable and loathsome, sympathetic and toxic. Fred is kind of a good guy, or he sees himself as a good guy. Of course, he also sees himself as a writer.
The film hits its high (pun intended) when pizza guy Carlo (SNL’s Chris Redd) joins the storytelling. It’s not quite enough to save a second act that simply goes on for too long. But a bloated midriff doesn’t spoil Scare Me entirely, a savvy piece of storytelling in itself.
Make America Great Again
Antebellum
by Hope Madden and George Wolf
The past is not dead. It’s not even past.
That Faulkner quote gets a lot of action in writers/directors Gerard Bush and Christopher Renz’s social nightmare Antebellum.
The titular term describes the period in American history just prior to the Civil War. That’s where this thriller finds its horror, and where a prominent, present day African American sociologist/activist/author wakes up to find herself trapped.
Janelle Monáe crafts an impressive lead as Veronica, a PhD beaten, branded and forced to accept a slave name in a film that plays out like a disturbingly relevant Twilight Zone episode.
Enslaved on a reformer plantation, “Eden” works to stay alive long enough to plan an escape and outsmart two Confederate officers (Eric Lange, Jack Huston) and the mysterious mansion mistress (Jena Malone).
The hideous rise of white nationalism is the true nightmare here – fertile and bloody ground for horror. From Godzilla to Get Out, horror has always brimmed with social commentary and anxiety, so it should come as no surprise that a genre film tackles America’s racist shame this directly.
And while this approach certainly grabs your attention with its boldness, Bush and Renz can get too caught up in obviousness and speech-making. The second act suffers most from these heavy hands. The modern day shenanigans with Veronica and two friends (Gabourey Sidibe, Lily Cowles) push too hard, last too long and say very little.
But as much as Spike Lee has recently connected the past and present of racism with layered nuance, Bush and Renz go right upside our heads. Pulpy exploitation? It goes there. It’s a horror movie.
Horror movies exist so we can look at the nightmare, examine it from a distance, and come out the other side, unscathed ourselves. Antebellum is acknowledgment and catharsis, and not only because all those Black people being terrorized on the screen are fictional, instead of real victims in another cell phone crime scene. The film’s true catharsis – a highly charged and emotional payoff – lies in Act 3: comeuppance.
And it is glorious.
There are stumbles getting to the fireworks, but for sheer heroic tit for tat, Antebellum delivers the goods.
A Darkness in the Light
Luz: The Flower of Evil
by Hope Madden
As colorful as a dream, Juan Diego Escobar Alzate’s feature film debut Luz: The Flower of Evil looks like magic and brims with the casual brutality of faith.
Set inside a religious community in the mountains of Colombia, the film drops us into ongoing struggles with the group’s religious leader, El Señor (Conrad Osorio). No one knows the devil as he does, he reminds his daughter Laila (Andrea Esquivel).
She lives contentedly, devoutly, along with her two adopted sisters. El Señor and the villagers consider the trio angels—just as they believe the little boy chained up out back is the Messiah who will deliver the community from its recent calamities.
Though never entirely detailed, the internal logic of the film and the community is clear enough to feel simultaneously familiar and horrifying. The way the filmmaker wrestles with what is and is not real, with forgiveness and the morally ambiguous nature of man, and with our tendency to blame God or the devil for our own shortcomings is frustrating and intoxicating.
Alzate gets maximum impact for minimum budget thanks in large part to Nicolas Caballero Arenas’s cinematography. His breathtaking visuals add spooky richness, turning this Western of sorts into a beautiful, lyrical, macabre Columbian folktale.
Lovely as it is, the film echoes of loss. The title itself conjures what is absent. As time wears on and the “angels” lose confidence in their father figure, remembered stories of the late mother figure Luz (Spanish for light) take the space for them that El Señor’s tales of God take for the rest of the community.
Luz: The Flower of Evil surprises as often as it relies on expectations to deliver its message. The film is more atmospheric than cautionary, its resolution a fitting end for characters’ whose own logic doesn’t likely reflect that of the audience. It is a vision, from its opening musical notes to its closing image, though, that marks a filmmaker worth discovering.
