Review of the Bram Stoker International Film Festival 2014 - Friday

Whitby, 23-27 October 2014

This is part two of a multi-part review. You can read part one here. Part three coming soon!

For more information about the Bram Stoker International Film Festival, please visit the festival website.

Content warning: this is a review of a horror film festival, and I will be talking in some detail about the content of the films we watched. In some places, this includes discussion of graphic depictions of sexual violence.

Our Friday began, again, with the second screening of the day: Stuart Gordon’s 2001 Lovecraft adaptation Dagon (based on the short stories ‘Dagon’ and ‘The Shadow Over Innsmouth’). A group of friends are stranded at sea during a frightening storm and race to a nearby town (Imboca) to get help – with disastrous (and eldritch) consequences.

The film starts off well, and the first landing at Imboca is really promising. As Paul (Ezra Godden) and Bárbara (Raquel Meroño) attempt to find some sign of life in the seemingly abandoned town, hints at the danger lurking behind the closed doors begin to emerge. The ever-present storm and torrential rain, which soaks the protagonists to the skin, adds an imposing and threatening backdrop that is almost tangible – the viewer begins to feel drenched by the town as Paul navigates Imboca’s twisted and unfriendly streets. As the inhabitants begin to show themselves, the glimpses of their ‘wrongness’ are suitably disturbing; Ferran Lahoz is particularly creepy as the town’s priest, a man who manages to be both friendly and menacing at the same time.

Unfortunately, Dagon soon begins to fall into the same trap as many other Lovecraft adaptations – when the horror is finally revealed, it actually looks rather ridiculous. At the risk of annoying the entire internet, I have to say: tentacles just aren’t scary, and neither are fish-people. The early glimpses (a gill here, an unblinking eye there) of the horror of Imboca eventually give way to hordes of fish-men chasing the protagonist from one deserted house to another, and the arrival of the half-woman, half-squid Princess Uxía (Macarena Gómez) is more absurd than horrific (especially when she dons her ceremonial headdress). That’s not to say that there isn’t any merit in the later sections of the film – I enjoyed Francisco Rabal’s performance as Ezequiel, the traumatized token non-fish resident of Imboca – but the film is much stronger at building up, rather than revealing, its horror.

Dagon was also the second film of the festival to use the grotesque violation of the female body as a vehicle for horror. The character of Bárbara is woefully underdeveloped, and she serves more as the object of Paul’s frantic search, rather than as a person in her own right. After the initial arrival at Imboca and the interaction with the priest, Bárbara fades into the background as Paul races around trying to discover her fate – before she is eventually raped to death by Dagon. Bárbara and Paul’s female friend Vicki (Birgit Bofarull) had earlier suffered a similar violation by tentacle, but, despite the fact that the woman is clearly traumatized by this event, Vicki’s rape is played almost for laughs (as Ezequiel struggles to think of the right words to explain it) and serves mainly to advance the ‘I can’t let this happen to my woman’ motivation of Paul. Dagon’s treatment of sexual violence – albeit penetration by a supernatural being, rather than rape by a human man – is not unique, but it feels disappointing, particularly as the early part of the film sets up Bárbara as more of a protagonist than she turns out to be.

After Dagon was a double bill that made for somewhat odd mix. The first film was a short film called Border Patrol (dir. Peter Baumann, 2013). Two German guards at the Austrian border find a body hanging from a tree, but they are not particularly keen to have this discovery prevent them from watching the big football match. This award-winning short film was really enjoyable – it was well shot and well acted, with just the right level of off-beat creepiness. Narrative can be difficult to handle in short films, but Border Patrol managed to balance characterization and atmosphere with a satisfying story arc that suited the form. I’ll admit, I did see the ending coming, but that didn’t spoil my enjoyment of the film. Apparently, despite being filmed in Germany, this short was an MA graduation project for students at Leeds Beckett University and it has been shown at a fair few festivals over the past year. We were definitely pleased to have caught it in Whitby.

The feature film in this double bill was Insectula! (dir. Michael Peterson, 2014), which was quite a dramatic change of pace. Inspired by creature-feature B-movies and The Twilight Zone, Insectula! is an in-your-face homage to schlock, with (deliberately) lurid Technicolor, gruesome visual effects and hammed-up acting. The film’s strengths are its obvious affection for its cinematic inspiration and its privileging of physical effects over CGI (this is particularly evident when a decomposing head is fished out of a river and dissected – not for the squeamish, but an impressive attempt at recreating the physicality of pre-CGI horror effects). I can see Insectula! going down well with fans of Troma films, but it doesn’t quite hit the mark for me; it isn’t my sense of humour, and it’s the sort of film that you either ‘get’ or you don’t.

Speaking of Troma, the next film on the schedule sounded an awful lot like it was going to be something along the lines of Troma’s 1984 film The Toxic Avenger. The blurb for Septic Man (dir. Jesse Thomas Cook, 2013) (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2574666/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1) reads:

“A sewage worker gets trapped inside a septic tank during a water contamination crisis and undergoes a hideous transformation. To escape, he must team up with a docile Giant and confront the murdering madman known as Lord Auch.”

As you can imagine, we were expecting another comedy horror with a sewage-contaminated superhero and a larger-than-life cast of supporting characters. But no. Far, far from it.

Septic Man is a dark and disturbing Canadian horror, carried almost entirely by Jason David Brown’s excellent performance as Jack (the eponymous Septic Man), a sewage worker who is asked by the shadowy Phil Prosser (Julian Richings) to assist with the aforementioned contamination crisis that has caused an entire town to be evacuated. As Jack investigates the source of the contamination, he becomes trapped in the sewers, and his ‘hideous transformation’ begins. The film is, at heart, a psychological horror – though there is a fair amount of bodyshock thrown in for good measure. It is, by turns, claustrophobic, grotesque, menacing and surreal. As Jack’s physical and mental wellbeing disintegrates, he is both threatened and rejected by the various people who become aware of his presence in the sewers (including the Giant (Robert Maillet) and Lord Auch (Tim Burd), but also Prosser and Jack’s wife Shelley (Molly Dunsworth)). Towards the end of the film, the line between reality and hallucination begins to blur, until it’s not quite clear what the reality beyond the sewer really is, and Jack becomes a sort of embodiment of the disavowed effluence in which he is imprisoned.

You definitely need a strong stomach for Septic Man, but I would highly recommend it. As a sustained exploration of the abjectification of the male body and the concomitant disintegration of masculine identity, it has few rivals. It’s quite simply the classiest and most intelligent film about poo that I’ve seen.

Another double bill followed Septic Man, kicking off with a Japanese short film, Bandaged (dir. Takashi Hirose, 2011). This was not a highpoint of the day for us. Hirose’s short film aims to shock, but falls rather flat. A young couple (played by Hiroshi Sekine and Ayano) spend their nights attacking and mutilating one another – and their days walking the streets swathed in bandages – as a way of feeling ‘connected’ and overcoming their existential despair. It was very hard to identify with these characters, as their alienation and angst was both pretentious and juvenile – not that juvenile alienation isn’t a serious matter, but more that this film presented it in a rather clichéd and two-dimensional manner. Additionally, cheap effects (including that pink-tinged fake blood that ruins horror films) and a predictable ending made this a somewhat disappointing addition to the schedule.

However, our disappointment didn’t last long, as the feature film in this double was another good one. Treehouse (dir. Michael Bartlett, 2014) seems to have had a few negative reviews from people who’ve seen it at other festivals, but we really enjoyed it and would definitely recommend it.

Treehouse tells the story of Killian (J. Michael Trautmann) who stumbles upon the aftermath of a violent kidnapping in his American home town. Ascending into the treehouse of the title, while he and his brother Crawford (Daniel Frederick) are trying to find a party, Killian discovers Elizabeth (Dana Melanie) hiding from the abductors of her younger brother. Together, the two teens try to evade the kidnappers and find Little Bob (Elizabeth’s brother). One of the film’s main strengths lies in characterization, and I enjoyed the development of Elizabeth and Killian, as well as their relationship with one another.

One of the criticisms of the film appears to revolve around the reveal of the perpetrators of the kidnapping; some viewers seem to have found this unsatisfying. I have to say I’m struggling to understand this criticism, as I thought the revelations were handled very well and were completely right for the tone and setting of the film. I also thought that the amount of information and backstory provided for the kidnappers was well-handled, with the film going for suggestion and implication rather than in-your-face shock. The pace of the film isn’t slow, by any means, but it has a measured feel to it, which allows for more character development (but less high-energy action). The use of flashbacks to intercut the main narrative heightens this focus on character, which adds depth to the protagonists’ flight from their aggressive foes.

All-in-all, Treehouse is a recommendation. It might not be the most original narrative ever, but was an engaging and well-made film that offered an interesting take on well-trodden ground. The screening was followed by a Q+A with executive producer Steve Weston, who talked a bit about the reasons for a UK production company making a film in the US, as well as some of the ups and downs of casting and producing the film. This session was interesting, but I was surprised to see that – unlike in previous years – the Q+A sessions weren’t chaired by one of the festival organizing team. A student volunteer introduced various filmmakers throughout the festival (though not always by name), but they were then left to field their own questions and moderate the sessions themselves. This didn’t seem like the best way to introduce a guest speaker, and a return to the more structured sessions of previous years would be advisable.

After a short break, we returned for the next double bill of the day, beginning with the Japanese short film Anemia (dir. Maya Kato, 2013). Anemia is the story of a female vampire who can only survive on the blood of male virgins. It’s a rather amateurish affair, with unconvincing acting and cinematography. Not our favourite short film by a long way, and definitely not a recommendation.

The feature film following Anemia was another Japanese offering. Gyo: Tokyo Fish Attack (dir. Takayuki Hirao, 2012) is an anime adaptation of the manga Gyo by Junji Ito. I’m not familiar with the manga, so I couldn’t say how well the film works as an adaptation. I’m also not particularly well-versed in anime, so I struggled a little to get my head into the right frame of mind to watch this after a day of horror films. Gyo: Tokyo Fish Attack is about a sudden infestation of biomechanical walking fish that carry ‘the stench of death’ with them. A group of friends discover that it is possible to become infected and devolve (evolve?) into a green, bloated fish monster, and so try to escape the infestation. I’m not sure if this film carried a deeper message or meaning, but it hasn’t converted me to anime. There were also a couple of scenes involving the forcible violation of the female body by a monstrous non-human that reminded me of the gratuitous tentacle rape of Dagon earlier in the day – as a result Gyo: Tokyo Fish Attack left me rather cold.

On to the final film of the day…

At last year’s festival, we watched a short film called Dollboy by director Billy Pon (and you can read my review of that piece here, which was prefaced by what we thought were two Grindhouse-style fake trailers for films called Circus of the Dead and Mister Fister (which was as horrible and misogynist as it sounds). However, it turns out that these were actually trailers for upcoming feature films by Pon. The final film of the day was Pon’s Circus of the Dead (2014), starring Bill Oberst Jr. as a sociopathic and brutal clown named Papa Corn, who kidnaps and tortures family man Donald Johnson (Parrish Randall).

Hmmm… what to say about Circus of the Dead? Initially, I was very much inclined to like it. The circus (and its clowns) are simultaneously malevolent and squalid, and there is a feeling of griminess that pervades the carnival. Papa Corn begins as a sublimely menacing and unsettling figure (heightened by the fact that we never see him out of costume or make-up), who gets some really quite funny one-liners. However, the film soon descends into a rather childish attempt to pile up the most shocking and distasteful imagery possible, simply for the sake of it. Once Papa Corn begins his night of tormenting Donald Johnson, the film really has nowhere to go, and it becomes just one vicious attack after another with escalating levels of shock and diminishing levels of menace. The levels of gratuitous sexual violence in Circus of the Dead were also off-putting. There are no female characters in this film, only female bodies to be violated by male characters. Rape is lazily played for laughs – it is part of the ‘black humour’ that Papa Corn is a ‘serial rapist’ – or for the purposes of torturing a male character. Women are dehumanized to the point of objectification, and we see both the rape of a dead woman’s severed head (as a way of tormenting her husband) and the violent removal of a foetus from a woman’s uterus, as well as a number of other attempted rapes. This was all utterly unnecessary and added absolutely nothing to the film or to the characterization of the male characters. Perhaps this is my personal taste, but I generally don’t enjoy films that set out so blatantly to exceed previous levels of violence and violation simply for the purposes of shock and titillation. I felt rather let down by Circus of the Dead, as it started out with so much promise, and I think it’s safe to say that I won’t be watching a feature-length version of Mister Fister.

While I enjoyed a lot about the films on Friday – with Border Patrol, Septic Man and Treehouse being my favourites of the day – I left a little disturbed by the prevalence of sexual violence and violation of the female body in the day’s schedule. It seemed a worrying trend, particularly the way in which rape of the female body was being used as a punishment for men (with little to no attention given to its impact on the actual victim).

That’s it for the Friday films. I’ll be posting my review of the Saturday screenings shortly…

Review of the Bram Stoker International Film Festival 2014 - Thursday

Whitby, 23-27 October 2014

This is part one of a multi-part review. Part two coming soon!

Content warning: this is a review of a horror film festival, and I will be talking in some detail about the content of the films we watched. In some places, this includes discussion of graphic depictions of sexual violence.

In October, my partner (RS) and I went to Whitby for the annual Bram Stoker International Film Festival. The festival is now in its sixth year, and this year it ran over five days. As well as a selection of independent horror films, the festival programme included evening events aimed at the pre-Whitby Goth Weekend Goth crowd – including the Vampires Ball, Children of the Night and 1880s Night music events, and a ‘Dark Arts’ exhibition). I’ve been to five out of the six festivals now, and you can read my review of last year’s festival here.

This year’s festival included 48 screenings over five days, so I’m going to jump right in and start talking about the films that we watched…

As RS and I always stay in a (lovely) B+B that’s about half an hour’s walk away from the festival venue – Whitby’s Spa Pavilion – and as we aren’t morning people by any stretch of the imagination, we missed a few of the morning screenings this year. Thursday kicked off for us with the second film of the day, a UK short film called The Dark Hours (dir. Daniel Smith, 2014).

The Dark Hours is a post-apocalyptic survivor tale about Richard (Simon Cotton), a man who is determined to do anything to protect his infected wife Catherine (Anna Skellern). Things take a dark turn when Richard meets another survivor, Cliff (Morgan Jones), and is forced (of course!) to make some difficult decisions. In some ways, the film is a fairly standard apocalypse story, relying on the usual trope of ‘don’t fear the infected, fear the other survivors’. Though we’re only given glimpses of the circumstances of the apocalypse, this also seems fairly standard fare – a worldwide plague of zombie/vampire infection leaving an embattled and disparate group of survivors to fight over dwindling resources and safe areas. However, the film has some pleasing elements that make it rather enjoyable. At the moment, I’m enjoying the current trend in zombie cinema of survivors battling to preserve their relationships with infected loved ones (Dominic Brunt’s 2012 Before Dawn has a nice treatment of this), as it makes a change from the ‘I don’t care who you were when you were alive, I’m going to blow your head off with a shotgun if you come within six feet of this shopping mall’ feel of earlier films. I like the humanization of the survivor/zombie relationship that is becoming more common, and this is very much at the heart of The Dark Hours. I also thought that Smith conjures up a great portrait of (post-)apocalyptic London – the scenes in the post-curfew tube station are particularly well done. Finally, the film has Morgan Jones doing an off-kilter turn as a threatening fellow survivor; I’ll always have a soft spot for Morgan Jones, because he was (and always will be, to me) Archer’s Goon.

Next up, we had our first feature film: Dracula in Pakistan (aka The Living Corpse or Zinda Laash, dir. Khwaja Sarfraz, 1967). To say this was a surprise is something of an understatement! To my shame, I’d never heard of Dracula in Pakistan before, and had no idea what to expect from the film known as ‘Pakistan’s first horror film’ (I don’t know if this claim is true, but it does appear to have been the first X-rated film produced in Pakistan). The film is an adaptation of Dracula, but with some interesting deviations from Stoker’s novel and the roughly contemporaneous Western adaptations typified by Hammer studios. The film tells the story of Professor Tabani (Rehan), a man who uses ‘evil scientist’ bubbling beakers to create a potion bestowing eternal life – and thus a new Prince of Darkness is born. When Dr Aqil (Asad Bukhari) visits the professor’s mysterious home, the vampire’s reign of terror really begins. This film is an absolute gem – the soundtrack and dance routines are just wonderful (although Wikipedia tells me that the dances were cut from the original cinematic release, as they were deemed too provocative). Dracula in Pakistan is kitsch, over-the-top and occasionally absurd – and we absolutely loved it.



After Dracula in Pakistan was another double bill, beginning with Dans L’Ombre [In the Shadows] (dir. Fabrice Mathieu, 2014). This short film is an interesting little piece, in which scenes from around fifty films featuring shadows are edited together and narrated by a shadow. Despite very much being an exercise in editing and research, this is quite an engaging short as the narrative that emerges from the montage (and is told by the shadow’s voiceover narration) is quite compelling.

The feature film in this double bill was Mount Nabi (dir. Seiji Chiba, 2014), which was the first disappointment of the festival. A Japanese found footage film, Mount Nabi is about a group of filmmakers who visit the eponymous mountain to make a horror film – but discover something far more horrific than they could have imagined. I’ll hold my hands up straightaway and admit that I can’t stand found footage films. I hated The Blair Witch Project, and I’ve pretty much hated every film that has mimicked that format since (the only exception being Carlo Ledesma’s 2011 The Tunnel, which I actually did enjoy). Mount Nabi does nothing new with the form, and, in fact, feels far closer to The Blair Witch Project than a lot of other recent found footage films. The screaming (and there is a lot of screaming), the motion-sickness-inducing camera angles, the up-nose snot shots, the inexplicable continuation of filming even after people start dying – all present in Mount Nabi. As an example of this type of horror film, sadly, Mount Nabi feels rather hackneyed. Worse still, the climax of the film’s horror is a lurid and deeply unsettling rape of a female character by a grotesque supernatural creature (and the subsequent rape and impregnation of another woman). There is something rather unsavoury about the way in which this sequence was filmed – particularly in the use of sound – and the narrative focus on the male characters and their respective proprietorial relationships to the raped women. There is little humanization of the violated women (before or after), and female bodies become (literally, in one case) vessels for the horror that faces the men. As we were to discover, this was to be a trend that was repeated throughout a number of the festival screenings.

The next film after Mount Nabi was Hansel and Gretel and the 420 Witch (aka Hansel and Gretel Get Baked, dir. Duane Journey, 2013). In case you can’t work it out from the title, this is a stoner comedy horror take on Hansel and Gretel – as if there haven’t been enough modern takes on that particular fairy tale already. RS and I aren’t huge fans of comedy horror, and the premise of this film really didn’t appeal… but it turned out to be really rather enjoyable. Lara Flynn Boyle plays Agnes, an old woman who is selling her home-grown pot (called Black Forest) to the local stoners. When her boyfriend goes missing after a visit to Agnes’s house, Gretel (Molly Quinn) decides to investigate – accompanied by brother Hansel (Michael Welch), of course. The eponymous siblings are joined by a cast of supporting characters including a local dealer, his Skittles-obsessed girlfriend, and some angry gang members. There’s also a ‘was that really him?’ cameo from Cary Elwes in the opening sequence.

Hansel and Gretel and the 420 Witch is one of those odd films that are much better than they should be. I can’t exactly put my finger on what it is that stops this film being as groan-worthy as it sounds, but the way the humour is handled probably has a lot to do with it. On the whole, the jokes aren’t as obvious and crude as you might expect, and in some places the cheap gag is rejected for a slightly more subtle one. The horror, too, is done with a little more intelligence than you might expect. Though there is plenty of gore, the film doesn’t descend to crude buckets-of-blood set-pieces – and, although the film is fairly predictable on the whole, there are a couple of surprises that I didn’t see coming. Overall, this film proves that solid execution can redeem even the silliest of premises.

We had to end our Thursday viewing here, as we’d got plans to meet up with family, and so we didn’t get to see the last three films of the evening.

I’ll be posting my review of Friday’s films shortly…

Review of the Bram Stoker International Film Festival (Saturday and Sunday)

Whitby, 24-27 October 2013

This is part three of a three-part review. You can read part two here, and part one here.

Saturday

Nothing on the main screen on Saturday morning appealed to us, so we decided to take the opportunity to try out Sultan’s Sci-Fi Suite… and this was a very good move. We started off with The Brain That Wouldn’t Die (dir. Joseph Green, 1962), slightly silly, slightly sinister evil scientist fare. Brilliant. As was our next choice… Strange Invaders (dir. Michael Laughlin, 1983). Not the best remembered sci-fi flick of the 80s, granted, but a wonderful homage to earlier B-movies and an awful lot of fun. Sultan’s Sci-Fi Suite got a big thumbs up from us.

Back to the main screen, the next film we saw was Pieces of Talent (Joe Stauffer, 2012). This feature film tells the story of Charlotte (Kristi Ray), a wannabe actress stuck working as a waitress and living with her deadbeat mother. One night at work, Charlotte runs into David (David Long), a weird loner who says he’s a filmmaker, and the two strike up a friendship. David wants Charlotte to be part of his new project… but she has no idea what this project really is.

It would be easy to describe Pieces of Talent as a serial killer film. And it is, sort of. But it also a lot more than that. It’s an unsettling, strange and compelling film, which is moved up from ‘good’ to ‘excellent’ by David Long’s amazing performance. Long’s character (he is listed in the credits as playing himself) is more than a hackneyed ‘creepy loner’. Without offering too much backstory, there is a depth and complexity to the character that is almost entirely conveyed through subtle dialogue and physical performance. There’s a scene part way through in which David takes a bath – that’s all that happens – but the combination of skilful direction and Long’s facial expressions communicates beautifully. Pieces of Talent was, without doubt, the highlight of our festival.



Following this, there were two shorts. The first of these, The Graveyard Feeder (dir. Rich Robinson, 2012), was a comedy horror about a graveyard keeper hurrying to save his father’s soul from a creature that’s feeding in the cemetery. I guess this was the sort of film that you either find funny or you don’t. We didn’t, so it didn’t really appeal. The second short in this double bill, on the other hand, could have been made for us.

Killer Kart (dir. James Feeney, 2012) was about exactly that… a killer shopping cart (or trolley for those of us on the other side of the pond). I should probably say that, on our first date, RS and I watched Rubber – a film about a homicidal tyre named Robert – and we credit our shared love of that film as one of the reasons we got together. So a film about a homicidal shopping trolley looked too good to be true… it wasn’t. It was everything we hoped it would be: a silly idea, but played completely straight and packed with references to horror classics and generic tropes. Hands down, the best short film of the festival this year (and one of the best we’ve ever seen at the festival).



Our final film of the evening was Devil in my Ride (dir. Gary Michael Schultz, 2013). Bad-boy Travis (Frank Zieger) returns for his sister Doreen (Erin Breen)’s wedding – but he accidentally gets her possessed by a demon. Travis and Doreen’s new husband Hank (Joey Bicicchi) have to go on a road trip (with demon-Doreen secured in the back of a van) to Las Vegas to find an exorcist. Devil in my Ride is a thoroughly enjoyable black comedy, which manages to stay just the right side of slapstick and hammy acting. The pacing wasn’t always great – the final hunt for the exorcist in Las Vegas was a bit too drawn out – but it was a good film, nonetheless.

Sunday

The final day of the festival started with another trip to the sci-fi screening room, for Invaders From Mars (dir. William Cameron Menzies, 1953). What can I say? An absolute classic – B-movie heaven, complete with pipe-smoking scientist and visible zips on the alien suits, and dripping with Cold War paranoia.

Next on the main screen was a double bill from Japanese director Kayoko Asakura. It began with the short film Hide and Seek (2013). A young girl visits a teacher for a koto lesson, and sees the teacher’s son playing hide and seek. Things are not what they seem. This was a skilful and engaging short film, beautifully shot and carefully paced. Were it not for Killer Kart, this would have been my favourite short of the festival.

Hide and Seek was followed by Asakura’s 2013 feature film, It’s a Beautiful Day. A group of international students in the US travel out to a backwoods retreat – which just happens to be the home of a pair of sadistic and brutal criminals. What differentiates this from the standard rural horror is a strange subplot that may or may not introduce a more supernatural element to the story (it’s not completely explained, and I don’t want to give any major spoilers). It’s a Beautiful Day is a competently made film, but was hard to follow in places. It is a bilingual film – trilingual, technically – with some of the characters only speaking in Japanese and some only in English (the subtitles switch between English and Japanese, clearly anticipating a mixed audience), and with a little Korean here and there. RS found it harder to follow this than I did, and he struggled a little with the heavily accented and broken English of the Japanese characters. I didn’t think this was much of a problem, but I did feel that the communication issues that were signalled so carefully at the film’s opening (the Japanese students didn’t know any English or Korean, the Korean student – though proficient in English – could speak no Japanese, and the backwoods American killers, naturally, were not polyglots) went anywhere. Much more could have been made of this. Overall, the film was a little confused and it was hard to reconcile the disparate plotlines – it was almost as though it was two different films mashed together. The events of the last half an hour complicated things even further, and we still can’t agree on exactly what happened at the film’s climax.

The next film was Heretic (dir. Peter Handford, 2013). Sadly, this was not a high point of the festival. Heretic told the story of Father James (Andrew Squires), a troubled priest who is coming to terms with the deaths of a teenage girl and her stepfather. James is plagued by guilt and returns to the girl’s home to face up to his responsibilities. Poor pacing and lacklustre acting made for a rather dull film, unfortunately, and we didn’t enjoy Heretic.

Following Heretic was the annual festival awards ceremony. Eight awards were given (designed by Neal Harvey of Rubber Gorilla Mask Making Studio), and the winners were announced by Sultan Darmaki. Seven awards were selected by a panel of judges (not sure who they were), and one was voted for by the audience.

Best Screenplay: Vampire Guitar

Best Male Lead: David Long (Pieces of Talent) – and RS and I both wholeheartedly agreed with this choice

Best Female Lead: Lexy Hulme (Lord of Tears) – this seemed like a foregone conclusion, given the praise Hulme’s performance had from the Lord of Tears team and members of the audience in the Q+A. While Hulme’s performance was undoubtedly the high point of the film, RS and I felt that Melanie Serafin (Throwback) or Michele Feren (The Visitant) showed far more range and carried much more of their respective narratives. But they weren’t playing ‘sexy’ characters, of course…

Best SFX: Thanatomorphose – from what I heard, this was a well-deserved award

Best Director: James Hart (Ascension) – this wouldn’t have been our choice

Best Short: Killer Kart – needless to say, we fully agreed with this award

Best Film: Gwai Wik (Re-Cycle) – one of the films that we missed, and apparently we missed out

Audience Choice: Lord of Tears – needless to say, this wasn’t the film we voted for, but as I said earlier, we appeared to be in a minority

After the awards, we watched a couple more films before heading back to Manchester. Dead Shadows (dir. David Cholewa, 2012) was a French horror about a comet crossing the path of the earth and bringing something terrible with it. RS enjoyed this one more than me, though he said it was a bit ‘Day of the Triffids-y’. I thought it needed a little more plot to balance out the gory (and, in one place, grotesque) violence. And then our final film of the festival was The Pyramid (Roberto Albanesi, Luca Alessandro, Simone Chiesa, Alex Visani and Antonio Zannone, 2013), an Italian anthology film about a demonic pyramid-shaped device that passes from person to person, promising infernal destruction. The less said about this film the better… it was not a high point for us.

So with that, we headed home. Some really nice surprises at this year’s festival, and we really enjoyed having the sci-fi movies as an alternative to the horror. Apparently next year’s festival will be five days, rather than the usual four, so we’re intrigued to know what new entertainment will be on offer.

In case you missed them, you can also read my reviews of Thursday and Friday's films.

For more information about the Bram Stoker International Film Festival, please visit their website.

Review of the Bram Stoker International Film Festival (Friday)

Whitby, 24-27 October 2013

This is part two of a three-part review. You can read part one here, and part three here.

We were up bright and early on Friday for Throwback (dir. Travis Bain, 2013), an Australian ‘creature feature’ that made for a great start to the day. Two men travel into the remote wilderness of Far North Queensland in search of a legendary hoard of gold. Instead they fall foul of the Yowie, Australia’s mythical hominid. Well-made and enjoyable, though the ‘fight for survival’ drags a little towards the end. The direction is done well, and the reveal of the monster is handled skilfully. The inclusion of a female character, Rhiannon the bush ranger (Melanie Serafin), gives a bit of a ‘King Kong’ moment that’s a tiny bit predictable, but this is sort of subverted at the film’s climax.

We had to duck out of the festival for a couple of hours (to buy wedding rings, in case you're interested), so missed Terence Fisher’s classic Brides of Dracula and Richard Pawelko’s black comedy Vampire Guitar. We came back for Lord of Tears (dir. Lawrie Brewster, 2013). And I suspect I’m going to be pretty unpopular with festival regulars and the denizens of the internet in my review of Brewster’s debut feature film.

Lord of Tears was, without doubt, the most talked about film at the festival. The creative team behind it introduced the film, gave a Q+A and stayed for the rest of the festival and chatted to other attendees. Though the film was privately financed by the production team, a successful Kickstarter appeal has funded the post-production and publicity. As it transpires, one of the backers was Sultan Al Darmaki, the new BSIFF president, and this has led to Al Darmaki creating his own film company – Dark Dunes Productions – with the intention of working with Brewster and his team on another project in the near future. As can be seen from the Kickstarter pitch, Lord of Tears has been marketed as a ‘Slender Man’, ‘Lovecraft’ horror, and Brewster also listed The Haunting and The Innocents as film inspirations and M.R. James, Edgar Allan Poe and generic ‘Gothic’ ghost stories as literary ones. The film tells the story of James Findlay (Euan Douglas), a schoolteacher who is haunted by his past and inherits a property in the Scottish Highlands. James travels to this house – which he had lived in once as a child – and is forced to revisit the dark secret of his past. While there, he meets a mysterious woman named Eve (Lexy Hulme) and is stalked by the Owl Man (voiced by David Schofield) – the ‘Slender Man’-esque character of the film’s PR campaign.

I’m afraid to say RS and I really did not enjoy this film. Admittedly, it is a low-budget indie film, but the production values are very low. The direction and acting are particularly bad, with some lines read so badly that it is difficult to connect with the characters. Lexy Hulme – known more as a dancer than an actor – shows some promise, but she’s given such terrible lines (“When I go to Paris, I shall waltz down the Champs-Élysées!”), and used mostly for extended and incongruous slow-motion dance sequences (including a ‘supernatural’ sequence inspired by Ringu), that her talents are wasted. The Owl Man – much anticipated by the film’s supporters – is essentially Slender Man with an owl head, and more comedic than frightening.

I think it’s only fair to say, however, that this is just our opinion of the film, and it doesn’t seem to be shared by anyone else. I believe this may be the only negative review of Lord of Tears anywhere on the internet, as every other review is glowing and effusive.

Luckily, our disappointment didn’t last long, as the next film was great! The Visitant (dir. Joe Binkowski, 2012) was an American paranormal entity chiller. Samantha (Michele Feren) performs as a ‘fortune teller’ while trying to make it as an actress, though she doesn’t believe a word of what she tells her clients. When a panicked woman appeals to her to end a ‘haunting’, Samantha is left with more than she bargained for. The Visitant was well-made and well-acted. It’s worth noting that Feren carries almost the entire film herself, with other actors appearing only at the beginning and end (or in video chat), but the film never feels like it was missing other actors. Despite her character running the horror-heroine gamut of screaming, crying, inadvisable actions and confusion, Feren’s performance never grated and we had nothing but sympathy for Samantha at the end of the film. By the end of the second day, The Visitant was definitely our favourite film of the festival so far.

Our evening ended with two short films: Cold Calling (dir. Dan Price, 2013) and The Earth Rejects Him (dir. Jared Skolnik, 2011). Cold Calling was a UK short about a market researcher who needs to knock on one more door to fill his quota… but chooses the wrong house to visit. It was reasonably well-made and intriguing, but at less than five minutes long, it’s hard to say much about this little piece. It felt like there was so much more that could have been shown. The Earth Rejects Him was a more developed piece, telling the story of Ray (Ellis Gage) a young boy who discovers a corpse while out in the woods with his friends. When Ray removes a tooth from the body, things begin to get strange. I really enjoyed this film, and found it unsettling and engaging. RS wasn’t so sure, and felt that too much was left unexplained at the end. However, we both agreed that it was a very well-made short, and showed a lot of promise. I understand that Skolnik is in the process of making a second short film, and I’m looking forward to seeing how his work develops.

The final film of the day was Thanatomorphose (dir. Éric Falardeau, 2012), but we didn’t watch this because I am a bit of a wuss when it comes to body shock stuff. Thanatomorphose is a Canadian film about a young woman who wakes up one day to find her body decomposing. By all accounts, the effects in this film are first rate… but that meant it was too rich for my blood.

Still quite a lot of films to go, so I'm going to split this review again. You can read part three here.

Review of the Bram Stoker International Film Festival 2013 (Thursday)

Whitby, 24-27 October 2013

This is part one of a three-part review. You can read part two here.

This month, my partner (RS) and I headed to the Whitby Spa Pavilion for the Bram Stoker International Film Festival. The festival is an annual event, showcasing horror features, shorts and documentaries from around the globe alongside Gothic-inflected entertainment, such as the Vampire Ball and the 1880s Night. This festival is now in its fifth year, and I’ve attended four out of five (RS has attended for the past three years), so I think we can count ourselves as regulars.

This year saw a couple of changes to the festival, not least the appointment of a new president: Sultan Saaed Al Darmaki, an Emirati businessman who’s made a bit of a splash sponsoring indie film projects on Kickstarter this year. The ‘extracurricular’ activities were also more ambitious than previous years, adding theatre (John Burn’s Aleister Crowley: A Passion for Evil), live music (Friday night’s Children of the Night event, featuring Inkubus Sukkubus, Vampyre Heart and Global Citizen), a ‘dark art exhibition’ and lectures from Karen Oughton and David Annwn Jones to the programme. In addition to this, a second screening room – Sultan’s Sci-Fi Suite, showing classic B-movies all weekend – was also opened this year.

As far as me and RS are concerned though, it’s all about the films and about discovering something new that we wouldn’t otherwise have seen, so we spent most of our time in the main screenings. Here’s what we thought about what we saw…

Thursday kicked off with the feature film Motel 666 (dir. Carlos Jimenez Flores, 2012), starring Wesley John as the host of a ghost-hunting TV show who’ve been called to a motel with a history of supernatural occurrences. The film is a bit of a mixed bag – the premise, while not particularly original, is handled with enthusiasm. The obligatory flashbacks to the ‘horrors’ of the motel are satisfyingly gruesome rather than ghostly, though occasionally my suspension of disbelief was stretched a little bit too far. The spoof credits for ‘Ghost Encounters’ are a lot of fun, and John is excellent (and a lot of fun) in his role as the show’s host Ted. The film’s twist is a bit predictable, but overall we enjoyed the film.

Next up was a double bill: Dollboy (dir. Billy Pon, 2010), followed by Hazmat (dir. Lou Simon, 2013). Dollboy is a short film about a group of people abducted, locked in a disused flea market, and hunted down by a grotesque murderer. The premise is unoriginal and, creepy as the design of the killer is, the execution is nothing new. The film is prefaced with two Grindhouse-style fake trailers: one for Circus of the Dead and the other for Mister Fister. The latter appears to be an excuse to take pointless sexualized violence against women to the most extreme and vile degree – the film is rated ‘PG’ and I can’t even bring myself to say what that stands for: you’ll have to use your imagination – and it left a really bad taste in my mouth.

Fortunately, this was followed up by the feature film Hazmat, which RS and I both enjoyed, and which was introduced by the director. The film followed a TV show (the second fictional TV team of the day!) called Scary Antics – based on the US show Scare Tactics – as they plan and begin to execute a prank on Jacob (Norbert Velez), a dark and unsettled young man who has recently lost his father. Of course, things go horribly wrong. Despite the fact that, in the Q+A following the film, Simon stressed her lack of experience, the film was very well-directed and well-shot. The acting was also good. The only problem we had with this film is that it is very much of a type – a group of characters trapped by a killer, with no chance of escape – and once you accept that premise, there really is nowhere for the narrative to go. As a result, the last half an hour drags a little, and we found ourselves rooting for the killer to get through his task a little quicker. But he is an awesome killer, so that’s not too bad.

After a very short break, we had another double bill. Two shorts, this time: Wounded (dir. Tom Cowles, 2013) and Ascension (dir. James Hart, 2013). Both films were introduced by their directors – and both featured the Yorkshire actor and friend of the BSIFF Mark Rathbone (who, like last year, brought his ferret along for the Q+A). Wounded is a short film about the aftermath of a task force raid on an underground group in an abandoned building. As two survivors face off against one another, one of them begins to feel the effects of his wounds. This film was Cowles’ final degree project, and this showed. I don’t mean to use ‘student film’ as a criticism here, but rather that it was clear that the director was showcasing his cinematography – possible spoiler alert: the film demonstrates Cowles’ skills in make-up, prosthetics and a little CGI, as well as his thorough study of a certain scene from a certain John Landis film) – rather than developing narrative or characterization. Apparently, Cowles got a first in his degree, and from the evidence we saw it was well-deserved, but he said little about his plans for the future.

Ascension was the debut short from James Hart, based on a short story by Dave Jeffery (which was included in Peter Mark May’s Alt-Zombie anthology). In a West Midlands village, a group of survivors band together to protect their community in the face of the zombie apocalypse. Sadly, Hart’s film left us cold (no pun intended). The acting and direction are weak, and there are issues with lighting and audio that make the film hard to watch. I found the film’s premise intriguing (though RS was less convinced), and think I need to read Jeffery’s short story to appreciate this more. I find zombie films that play around with our expectations of the ‘plucky band of survivors’ much more interesting than those films that focus on ‘new’ characteristics of zombies. But the execution here is disappointingly poor.

Thursday was a bit of a full-on day, so we took a break and missed Ivan Zuccon’s Wrath of the Crows (2013). We came back for The Impaler (dir. Derek Hockenbrough, 2013), a film about a group of young Americans who decide to stay at Vlad the Impaler’s castle in Romania during a trip to Europe. The visitors become trapped in a bloody ritual set in motion by Vlad’s 500-year-old pact with the devil. The film was entertaining enough, and competently made, but it could have been a lot better. I think I was expecting more from a film about Vlad the Impaler led by a Romanian creative team. Not only was the film shot in America (though the sets were convincingly European), the version of Vlad was distinctly Hollywood (in fact, it was the ‘Vlad Dracul’ from Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula). I was hoping for a Vlad-as-national-hero rather than Vlad-as-eternal-lover, so was a little disappointed. Overall, The Impaler felt like a modern Hammer horror – complete with a couple of ‘Transylvanian’ characters that would have absolutely been at home in a Hammer feature – and that’s not a bad thing as such, but not the most original offering of the festival.

The next film was a real treat. I’m not sure why I’ve never seen Sion Sono’s Suicide Club (2001) before, but I’m really glad I’ve seen it now. A dark, gory, surreal, hallucinatory and funny journey through a seemingly incomprehensible series of events, Suicide Club starts with 54 schoolgirls throwing themselves under a subway train. This is the beginning of an epidemic of suicides, investigated by Detective Kuroda (Ryô Ishibashi) and apparently linked to the ubiquitous all-girl J-pop group Dessert (written with various romaji spellings). Everything that happens in the film is baffling, compelling and mystifying in equal measure. Is it a film about the shallowness and disconnection of contemporary Japanese culture? Is it a gory and trippy retelling of the Pied Piper folktale? Is it a musing on the existential angst of youth? Is there any message at all behind the film? Probably… possibly… no one seems to agree. But whatever the film is about, it is a work of disturbed genius and we loved it.

Dessert’s signature song, ‘Mail Me’ (which was used to fantastic effect throughout the film) is now the creepiest earworm I’ve ever had. I couldn’t find a video that gives you the full effect, but here’s the song (sorry, no subtitles on this video) in case you want to listen.



Just two more films for us on Thursday (as we decided to skip the late-night screening of John Badham’s Dracula): short films Child Eater (dir. Erlingur Throddsen, 2012) and Count Yoga (dir. Adam Dallas, 2013). The former was a babysitting horror/bogeyman-is-real story that was well-done but unoriginal. The latter was a cringe-worthy ‘comedy’ about a Bulgarian (?!) vampire who has moved to Bondi Beach, Australia. It was as bad as it sounds.

We saw so many films over the weekend, I've had to split this review up. You can read the next part of this review here.

Review of the Bram Stoker International Film Festival (Sunday & Monday)

Whitby 29-31 October 2011

This is part two of a two-part review. You can see my review of Friday and Saturday here.

Sunday (for RS and me) started with Axed (Ryan Lee Driscoll), a dark and witty British horror feature. Kurt Wendell loses his job – a victim of the global financial crisis – and the tension begins to show in his relationship with his family. He surprises them with a daytrip to the countryside… though ‘surprise’ is probably a bit of an understatement. Kurt is losing his mind, and the title of the film should give a good hint of what is to come. Axed is wonderfully tongue-in-cheek, and the lead actor (stand-up comedian Jonathan Hansler) played his role with a fantastic mixture of sinister menace and maniacal exuberance. There were, unfortunately, a couple of continuity errors, which might be a result of the shoot taking less than three weeks! But otherwise, RS and I agreed that this was definitely one of the best films of the festival. The cast and crew took a Q and A after the screening, and the director announced that he has just signed a distribution contract. I’d recommend you watch out for this one.

Next up was Shadows (John Penney), which stars Cary Elwes and William Hurt (surely the most prestigious cast of the festival). Set in Thailand, this feature told the story of Jeff Mathews, who survives a car accident that kills his wife and child. Troubled by visions of the dead, Jeff realizes that his soul has remained in the ‘Shadowlands’ and he must go on a scary journey to the underworld to ‘reunite’ with himself. Filmed on location (including some scenes on the River Kwai), Shadows clearly had a far bigger budget than the other films shown at the festival, and the direction and shooting were excellent (not to mention the acting by Elwes and Hurt). Though the story wasn’t the most original, this film felt very much like a mainstream release. The Q and A with writer/director Penney revealed that there has been a problem securing distribution, and so release had been put on hold. This is a shame, as Shadows definitely holds its own against recent studio releases.



Two features wrapped up Sunday for us. Bruce Ornstein’s Vamperifica was a comedy horror (complete with musical number, ‘Ha Bloody Ha’) in which two of the world's last surviving vampires have sworn to bring back their dead king (Raven), but discover that he has been reincarnated as a bitchy and camp wannabe actor called Carmen. Vamperifica was good fun, though a little predictable and didn’t really go anywhere. I’d watch it again though, as it was engaging and (in places) rather witty. And finally, we watched Baby Shower (Pablo Illanes), a rather brutal and bleak Chilean horror. Angela is pregnant with twins, and her friends (Claudia, Manuela, Olivia and Ivana) arrive at her secluded home to throw her a baby shower. Angela has a troubled past, and the truth about her relationship with husband Felipe is revealed slowly as the film progresses. She has become involved with a sort of spiritual leader, and does not welcome the intrusion of her ‘friends’. Things take a turn for the violent, and a series of gruesome attacks occur (including a brutal rape, a man hoisted onto a meat hook and something involving a silver cocaine straw that still makes me a little queasy). Overall, the film was very enjoyable, though full of very bloody and graphic violence. RS and I were a little divided on our final verdict though. He felt the film was rather confusing, with too much left unexplained, whereas I thought it was one of those films that make the audience work a little harder than usual. We also couldn’t decide whether the ‘spiritual leader’ was a Wicker Man-type Pagan or a devil worshipper. Apparently it’s a very fine line…

As a side note, when we got back to our guesthouse, we just couldn’t resist the lure of the B-movies, and watched Omega Cop - crazy post-apocalyptic fun starring Adam West. About as different as you can get from Baby Shower!

Monday was the final day of the festival, and due a long drive home, we couldn’t stay for all the films. What we did see caused some strong feelings though…

The first screening was a selection of shorts by Elisabeth and Brenda Fies. Hard to Do was a comedy horror drawing heavily from Dexter. A man kidnaps his ex-girlfriend and therapist in order to terrorize them. There were some funny lines, but I was too distracted by numerous continuity gaffs (like disappearing tape and a missing drill bit). Scrutinize was based on an urban legend about a woman getting onto a train and seeing two men holding up an apparently unconscious girl; Faux showed a glamorous woman driving down Rodeo Drive, before returning to a slum apartment and removing all the artificial aids to her glamour (false nails, breasts, butt enhancements, eyelashes and wig). Finally, Scream Queen was a slasher-type horror, but with a ‘victim’ who pulls back at the last minute and begins criticizing the film in a brattish way – revealing that we are actually watching a film being shot. The entire selection was poor and fairly lacklustre, as well as being poorly made in places, and RS and I were left wondering why a whole session had been devoted to the work of these filmmakers (but more on that below).

Next was a screening of Joseph Maddrey’s Nightmares in Red, White and Blue: The Evolution of the American Horror Film. As many readers will already be familiar with this documentary (or with Maddrey’s book on which it is based), I won’t say too much about it. Suffice to say, this is a fabulous survey of the genre, with insightful comments from influential filmmakers (John Carpenter and George A. Romero, particularly, won our hearts).

So, finally, our last selection of six shorts. Playthings: Hunt (Wade K. Savage) was a promotional short for a forthcoming feature film, in which two young women are hunted through the woods and must do some horrible things to survive. I really enjoyed this short – almost all the violence took place off-camera, and no explanations were offered, which worked really well. This was all about atmosphere, tension, and the audience’s own imagination, and was a great example of how to make a genuinely scary film on a small budget. Next, Juan Con Miedo [Fearful John] (Daniel Romero) was a Pan’s Labyrinth-inspired Spanish horror, in which two children - Maria and Juan - shelter from a storm and read an unsettling fairy tale in an apparently abandoned house. Stylish and creepy, this film’s debt to Guillermo del Toro was impossible to deny. Next, The Furred Man (Paul Williams) was a brilliant British (and very British) comedy horror about the interrogation of Max Naughton (a campsite owned who is, for the duration of the short, wearing a werewolf costume) for a series of brutal murders on his property. The hapless Max tells his story to two sceptical police officers, and the truth is finally revealed. This short was absolutely wonderful – funny, but with a good dash of horror, and all beautifully underplayed by Daniel Carter-Hope as Max. And after this gem, we had Sacrifice (sadly, I didn’t catch the name of the director and haven’t been able to find this film online). This was a stylish modern Gothic about a priest who hunts vampires. It didn’t do anything new plotwise, but was visually stunning.

Unfortunately, the next film really put a downer on the day for us. We’d seen the cast/crew promoting Attack of the Martian Mutant From Mars during the weekend, and from what we could see it was going to be a spoof B-movie. While this was, in a way, true, the film (which was hardly a ‘short’ at half an hour long) was a joke project by Neal Harvey of Rubber Gorilla Mask Making Studio. Shot in shaky black-and-white, and supposedly mimicking the bad acting and implausible plots of earlier monster movies, this film felt like a (bad) student film project. The humour was heavy-handed (mostly revolving around the vague use of the word ‘science’ and the fact that the main character smoked a pipe), and the filming amateurish. It massively missed the point of the B-movies that allegedly inspired it – however silly those films were, they always took themselves seriously. What really riled RS and me was the fact that this film featured the son of the festival director and, clearly, many of his friends. I was also shocked to see Elisabeth Fies (who I have mentioned above) appear, which explained why she and her sister were offered a full session of their own films earlier in the day. This was a piece of self-indulgent nonsense, which had no place at a serious horror film festival. As far as we could see, this was the festival directors letting their friends mess about on the big screen, which was a bit disrespectful to the serious filmmakers who had shown their films and, in some cases, travelled a long way to attend the festival.

Nevertheless, we had one final ‘real’ film on offer before we had to leave. Jonathan Martin’s An Evening With My Comatose Mother was a 33-minute Hallowe’en horror, giving a twist on the ‘terrorized babysitter’ movie. Dorothy is called in to look after the catatonic mother of Alice Poe… and bad things happen. The film was well-made, with some pretty creepy set pieces. In the Q and A afterwards, director Martin said that the film was made on a $10,000 budget, and this certainly showed in the production values. However, the premise and execution seemed a little dated – though maybe I’ve just seen too many babysitter horror films. Martin said he is planning a feature film, as the short has been well-received. It might not be the most original film ever, but I would definitely watch a feature-length Evening With My Comatose Mother, maybe on a dark and creepy Saturday night.

Final thoughts on the festival? I’m not sure it quite lived up to last year’s success. The focus on indie horror was good – though I did enjoy the classic movies in last year’s programme. But the organizers seemed to have different priorities this year. By taking over Hallowe’en weekend – meaning that the main events of the Whitby Goth Weekend were moved to the following week – the festival promoters were obviously trying to cash in on the number of Goths who flock to Whitby at Hallowe’en. For this reason, a number of non-film-related events threatened to overshadow the screenings, designed as they were to pull in cash-laden Goths instead of indie horror geeks. As noted, Monday’s programme was too self-indulgent for our tastes, and seemed to imply a lack of respect for the hardworking filmmakers who were showing their films.

This is a real shame, as the festival has the potential to be a great horror film festival. I mean… come on… horror films at Hallowe’en in Whitby, you shouldn’t be able to go wrong. And if we ignore the questionable choices on the final day, this year’s schedule was really good. I would love to see the festival return to showing a range of good quality indie horror, coupled with a few classics for balance. RS and I will definitely look forward to seeing what’s on offer in 2012.

Next year’s festival will take place on 25-28 October. For more details, visit the festival website.

You can see the awards given out by the festival here, but here are mine and RS’s ‘awards’:

Best Feature: Vampires (Vincent Lannoo)

Second Best Feature: Axed (Ryan Lee Driscoll)

Best Short: The Furred Man (Paul Williams)

You can see my review of Friday and Saturday at the festival here.

Review of the Bram Stoker International Film Festival (Friday & Saturday)

Whitby 29-31 October 2011

This is part one of a two-part review. You can see my review of Sunday and Monday here.

In October, my partner (RS) and I headed to Whitby for the Bram Stoker International Film Festival. The festival is an annual event, showcasing horror features, shorts and documentaries from around the globe. I attended last year’s festival, which featured a number of classic Hammer horror films alongside independent shorts and features. This year’s programme promised a greater focus on indie films, as well as a Vampire Ball, a couple of live performances and horror-themed stalls and merchandise. So… here’s what we thought…

We arrived in Whitby on Thursday and the festival started on Friday. RS hadn’t been to Whitby before, but I’ve been many times – I was a Gothy teenager, so it’s only to be expected. I mention this only to explain why we spent Friday morning wandering around the town, and didn’t arrive at the film festival itself until the 2.30pm screening. This was a duo of shorts, followed by a feature (all of which were allegedly premiering at the festival). First up was Zombiefication, a seven-minute short (available to watch on the YouTube). The film is a fairly fun little take on a safety instruction video, offering a guide to how to deal with a zombie outbreak in a movie theatre. Following this was the French short Cabine of the Dead (Vincent Templement). Again, this was a zombie outbreak film, with a man called Patrick trapped in a phone booth, trying desperately to call for help. The production values and acting were excellent, and the basic idea (though not completely original) was compelling.

However, this leads to my first criticism of the festival as a whole. In the course of writing this review, I happened to look up a few of the films online. I was a bit disappointed to find that the screening of Cabine of the Dead was far from being a premiere, as the short was shown at a number of other festivals prior to the Bram Stoker Festival. I suspect ‘premiere’ on the programme meant ‘UK premiere’, but it would have been better if this had been made clearer.

This session was finished off with the 2008 Chilean-American feature film Descendants – AKA Solos – directed by Jorge Olguin (again, not strictly a 'premiere'). This post-apocalyptic zombie infection movie told the story of Camille, a young girl born with an undefined genetic immunity to the ‘infection’ that is destroying humanity. Highlights included the good (and somewhat unsettling) portrayal of Camille and the development of the ‘beware of other survivors’ trope. However, the film was somewhat let down by a very odd ending involving a giant squid (which was almost entirely incomprehensible). Up to the final scene, though, RS and I thoroughly enjoyed Descendants.

The next screening was the undoubted highpoint of the festival for us. The Belgian ‘documentary’ Vampires (Vincent Lannoo) followed a family of vampires living in modern-day Belgium. George Saint-Germain, his wife Bertha and their ‘children’ Grace and Samson share their daily (or, rather, nightly) lives with a rather nervous film crew. The film was beautifully shot and acted, and very funny in places. Yet it was also creepy, sinister and, at times, really rather dark. This was without doubt our favourite film of the festival, and I can’t recommend it highly enough.



Next was a selection of short films, each retelling a story by Edgar Allen Poe. We had a black-and-white Spanish version of El Corazon Delator [The Telltale Heart], which had the feel of a much older horror film (which is not necessarily a bad thing). This was followed by The Raven, featuring a Professor Yaffle-like raven that was surprisingly sinister, then a ‘Ray Harryhausen Presents…’ retelling of The Pit and the Pendulum. Finally, we had a very dark animated version of Annabel Lee. We did disagree about which of these shorts were the best. RS preferred The Raven, in part because he has a real soft spot for this poem (and he did like the animatronic raven). But I loved Annabel Lee for its puppet Edgar Allen Poe (with nails in his eyes!) and the very creepy baby-doll angels. We were in complete agreement about The Pit and the Pendulum, though, which was a silly little short, missing most of Poe’s original story and with the feel of a kid’s cartoon rather than a horror short.

We decided to call it a night after the Poe shorts, and go for dinner. I do just want to add a word about the guesthouse we were staying in. Prospect House was clean, friendly and welcoming. But one of the highlights for us was the collection of DVDs available for guests to watch – particularly the superb selection of B-movie horror. As if we hadn’t got enough films to watch, we decided to end the night with Psycho Cop. Not exactly of the same quality as the films shown at the festival, but very, very funny.

On Saturday, we were also a bit rubbish at getting to the start of the screenings. Instead of heading straight to the festival, we spent the morning at Whitby Abbey – possibly one of my favourite places in the UK.



We got to the Pavilion at 3pm for Cassadaga (Anthony DiBlasi). This was a rather disjointed feature, telling the story of a deaf woman (Lily) who moves to Cassadaga (the ‘psychic capital of America’) following the death of her younger sister. Lily takes part in a séance, which leads to her being attacked by the ghost of a murdered woman. She decides to investigate the murder, which was apparently at the hands of a deranged psychopath attempting to build a woman-marionette. The problem with Cassadaga was that it appeared to be several different films sewn together. Lily’s story had the tone and plotting of a TV movie about coming to terms with grief; the séance storyline (complete with spiritual black woman in tribal-esque clothes) was more psychological thriller; the marionette killer felt more like Saw-inspired torture porn. Everything about these storylines was different – from the lighting and direction to the levels of violence and sexual reference. Lily’s story was by far the weakest, with way too much backstory (some of which didn’t go anywhere) and over-sentimentalization. Anyone who follows me or RS on Twitter might be aware of our recent Saw binge, so it should come as no surprised that we thought the strongest part of the film was the deranged puppet man. It’s a shame that these elements didn’t come together to create a coherent narrative.

No more films for Saturday, as we decided to go to the Vampire Ball (compered by the wonderful Rosie Lugosi).

You can read my review of Sunday and Monday here.

Two Horror Film Festivals for October

We'll be absolutely spoilt for horror films this October.

First up... The Bram Stoker Horror Film Festival runs in Whitby from the 14th-17th October. Featuring 'independent narrative features, documentaries and shorts from around the world', this festival promises to offer films that you may not have chance to see elsewhere, including some world premieres. In addition to this, awards will be given in several categories.

As well as the films, there will be some pretty impressive special guests, a Hammer exhibition, talks and a Vampires' Ball on Saturday 16th October. And, of course, the whole thing takes place just yards away from where the Demeter ran aground (and spiritual home of all goths) - Whitby.

There are a few different passes and ticket options available on their website, and (if you don't fancy the films) tickets can be bought separately for the Vampires' Ball.

And if that's not enough...

Grimm Up North! Manchester's Premier Horror and Sci Fi Festival is returning for its second year. Running 28th-31st October at The Dancehouse in central Manchester, this festival features films, talks and special guests (including Ramsey Campbell and Christopher Priest).

Among the films already announced are Reel Zombies and Alien vs. Ninja. Visit their website and sign up for the newsletter to find out more.

Again, there are a variety of ticket options, including a few early-bird passes that allow you to save up to £40 on tickets.

(I should add that we are quite big fans of Grimm Up North! here at She-Wolf, as they've been really supportive while we've been getting the project off the ground.)

So between the two festivals, you should be able to get enough frights to keep you awake for most of November. Enjoy.