Saturday 22 December 2018

Review: Abertoir: The International Horror Festival of Wales 2018 (Thursday and Friday)

13th-18th November 2018
Aberystwyth Arts Centre, Wales

This is the second part of my review of the films we saw at this year's Abertoir Festival. As we saw a LOT of films during the festival, I'm trying to make my review more manageable by doing it in three parts. You can see my post about the films we saw on Tuesday and Wednesday in my previous post, but here are the films we saw on Thursday and Friday.

Thursday 15th November


Blue My Mind (dir. Lisa Brühlmann, 2017)


The first screening on Thursday was Swiss film Blue My Mind. This is a coming-of-age, body-horror-inflected transformation tale – and one of the highlights of the festival for me. Mia is 15 years old and going through some changes. She’s at a new school, struggling not to fight with her parents, and experiencing new physical sensations that she hasn’t felt before. Her body is also transforming – and it’s clear this isn’t a standard puberty. So far, so Ginger Snaps. But – though I am a huge fan of Ginger SnapsBlue My Mind offers something different, and something more. Desperate to mask the pain and confusion of her transformation, Mia turns to drink, drugs and sex as a distraction. And this is presented with a brutal rawness, which builds to a climactic scene that is truly devastating to watch. But Blue My Mind’s originality really lies in its depiction of Mia and her peer group. Mia isn’t a weirdo loner, but rather a slightly sheltered and awkward teen who wants to find somewhere to fit in. In a sleight-of-hand moment, Mia is rebuffed by the apparent ‘mean girls’ of the piece and a ‘good girl’ tries to befriend her. That’s not what Mia wants though, and she courts the friendship and attention of the ‘bad girls’. With incredible performances from Luna Wedler (as Mia) and Zoë Pastelle Holthuizen (as ostensible ‘Queen Bee’ Gianna), what unfolds is one of the most nuanced and honest portrayals of teen female friendships I think I’ve ever seen. This isn’t a film about ‘good girls’ and ‘bad girls’, it’s a film about girls. And it’s a film about one girl coming to terms with the fact that she isn’t quite like the others. Blue My Mind is a painful, horrific and beautiful story of transformation. Definitely recommended.

Cut and Run: A Brief History of the Slasher - a presentation by Steve Jones


The next event at the festival was a talk by Dr Steve Jones of Northumbria University on the history of the slasher film. This was a fascinating and entertaining trip through the origins and precursors of the subgenre, through the ‘classics’ to the video nasty era and beyond. Insightful and engaging, this talk really helped crystallize some thoughts I’d been having about slashers, but it also gave me loads of new information and things to think about. It’s always great to see an expert talk about a subject they’re knowledgeable about with such enthusiasm – but I was particularly happy to see that Jones didn’t follow the fashion of denigrating 90s slashers (like I Know What You Did Last Summer) and acknowledging them as simply ‘postmodern’ or ‘knowing’. As he pointed out, the success of those films doesn’t just lie in them being po-mo – it’s also because they’re actually good films.

Short Films Competition Part 1


Abertoir is part of the European Fantastic Film Festivals Federation and participates in the Méliès Awards cycle for short films. After watching all the short films screened this year, the audience voted, and the festival then awarded a Méliès d’Argent to the highest ranked film, which then goes on to compete for the Méliès d’Or later in the cycle. This year, the shorts were screened in two lots. In this first panel, we saw Caronte (Luis Tinoco, 2017), a visual effects-laden piece in which the story of a young girl’s family life intersects with that of a futuristic space pilot, and Reprisal (Mike Malajalian, 2017), a taut, edgy piece about a woman facing her husband’s return from combat. Miedos (Germán Sancho Celestino, 2018) is a monster-in-the-wardrobe story with a (unfortunately rather predictable) twist, while Post-Mortem Mary (Joshua Long, 2017) is a perfectly pitched and beautifully designed story of two Victorian post-mortem photographers undertaking an unsettling job. Centrifugado (Mireia Noguera, 2017) sees a woman apparently con and trap a young man in her apartment (though, again, the ending was a bit predictable); FlyTrap (Connor Bland, 2018) is a terse animation about a germaphobe trying (and failing) to deal with his flatmate’s unsanitary habits. Another animation, but much less successful, was Sunscapades (Ben Mitchell, 2018). This one is more a cartoon in the Ren and Stimpy vein – more comedy than horror, despite some violence – and not to my taste. Highlights of this panel were Who’s That at the Back of the Bus? (Philip Hardy, 2018), an absurdist but carefully paced piece about a woman on a bus spotting something in the mirror, and – my favourite short film overall – Baghead (Alberto Corredor Marina, 2017), a witty, compelling and bleak story about a grieving man who visits a witch that can channel the dead.

Last Man on Earth with Animat Live Soundtrack


The next event on the programme was a performance by Sheffield-based music producers and performers, Animat. It was an interpretative soundtracking of the film The Last Man on Earth, using original composition, remixes, dialogue from the film and sound effects to transform the film into a soundscape. The Last Man on Earth is the second least well-known adaptation of Richard Matheson’s novel I Am Legend. Made in 1964 and starring Vincent Price, it is a fairly faithful adaptation of the novel, though it changes the book’s vampires into something more zombie-like and alters the protagonist’s relationship with Ruth, the infected woman he encounters, and the detail of his ultimate fate. Animat’s performance has the film screened in its entirety with their soundscape superimposed. I did find this an intriguing idea, and I was curious to see how the act of interpretation could be carried through soundtrack. In places, it works very well, with, for instance, repeated and echoed phrases (both musical and dialogue) creating an eerie emphasis on the futility and isolation of Robert Morgan’s (as the Neville character is called here) situation. Elsewhere, however, it falls a bit flat. The inclusion of certain pop songs didn’t really work for me, and this aspect was far less creative than the original scoring. I’m not sure it can really be called an act of ‘interpretation’ to play Michael Jackson’s 'Thriller' as zombies gather in the foreground outside Morgan’s house. The Last Man on Earth is an interesting film to watch if you’re familiar with I Am Legend and its adaptations, and I did find myself at times just wanting to watch the film ‘straight’. However, there were moments of very creative interaction between soundtrack and image that realised the potential of the performance and added a thought-provoking dimension to the screening.

Cam (dir. Daniel Goldhaber, 2018)


Cam is a horror film set in the world of camgirls (models/performers who stage – usually erotic – acts on webcam in exchange for money and gifts). I try not to read much about films before I see them at a festival, as I like to go in without knowing what to expect. So that first sentence was all I knew about Cam before the screening, and I will admit I had some reservations. I was worried it was going to be a ‘killer stalks sex workers’ type of thing, and the film’s opening sequence appeared to be about to confirm this. Once again, I should have had more faith in the festival programmers – by this point, we’d already seen some really interesting challenges to the weary stereotypes of women in horror, and so I should’ve known this wouldn’t be a gratuitous stalk-and-slash. I now know that Cam was written by Isa Mazzei, who drew on her experience of cam work and intended her film to be a more nuanced and authentic representation of the job. And it is certainly that – it’s also a smart and stylish horror film with great performances (particularly from Madeline Brewer as the protagonist). That’s right – this film has a protagonist, not a ‘final girl’ or a parade of screaming victims. And the horror in Cam is also different to what I expected. The ‘bad thing’ that happens to Alice (who works under the name Lola) is creepy and unsettling, with psychological terror taking the fore over a threat of violence. In many ways, the film is at pains to announce its newness – this is absolutely a story of the twenty-first century – but for all its techno-threat and techno-survival, it’s also well-grounded in older Gothic tropes. The madwoman is out of the attic and on the screen.

UK Premiere: The Black Forest (dir. Rodrigo Aragão, 2018)


A Mata Negra is a Brazilian horror infused with fabulist elements and heavy on practical effects. In the heart of the eponymous forest (‘black’ as in dark and scary, not as in Schwarzwald – we’re in Brazil here, not Germany), a young girl stumbles upon a dying man who begs her to wait with him overnight to complete a mysterious ritual. With the man is a book, and he makes her promise to read only the page he has marked – and not to delve into the book’s other secrets. Of course, as a dark fairy tale, we know that she won’t heed this warning. As we learn, the book is the lost Book of Cypriano, which contains within its pages dangerous spells that will give its owner power over life, death and wealth. Of course, when life takes a bad turn for the girl, she can’t help but turn to the book for the promise it holds. And things go very wrong. While the film’s premise seemed interesting enough, the overall effect didn’t quite work for me. Tonally, the film is rather uneven. It begins with a darkly sumptuous fairy tale setting – with almost-echoes of Guillermo del Toro – and a young heroine who seems to be all innocence in the face of a threatening world. But the film’s violence, which is conveyed by in-your-face practical effects, veers quickly towards schlock, with some sequences seeming almost designed to make the audience queasy. As the magic goes repeatedly wrong, and the young spell-caster seeks to correct her errors, the film loses a sense of story, descending into a series of set-pieces and escalating gore. The film’s ending is bizarre – not necessarily in a bad way – with a coda that is both incongruous and suggestive. But, sadly, this was not one of my favourites.

Okay, we arrived on Thursday's morning fully intending to stay until the bloody end. But it seems our stamina was still a bit lacking, so we couldn't hack the final screening of the night. This time, we missed Bloody Moon (dir. Jesús Franco, 1981).

Friday, 16th November


Summer of 84 (dir. Anouk Whissell, François Simard and Yoann-Karl Whissell, 2018)


After this next screening, one of our fellow festival-goers informed us (no idea how reliably) that Summer of 84 was actually written before Stranger Things, though it was released some time later. For this reason, I’m not going to draw any comparisons with Stranger Things, as that seems a little unfair and – to be honest – unoriginal, as I’m sure plenty of other will do that. Also, I don’t like Stranger Things (don’t @ me), but I did enjoy Summer of 84 so there’s no need for the comparison. However, I will compare it to The ’Burbs as the film treads some of the same ground as the 1989 film (but with very different tone and effect). Davey is a paperboy in the Oregon ’burbs during the summer of 84. The town is alight with news of the Cape May Slayer, a serial killer who’s abducted and murdered at least thirteen teenage boys over the course of a decade. Davey becomes convinced that his neighbour, a well-respected police officer, is the killer. As the adults around him – obviously – don’t share his suspicions, it’s up to Davey and his friends to investigate. The story unfolds with a slow, almost sinister, pace, with the light-hearted nostalgic touches giving way to the dark reality of exactly what is being uncovered. It’s also a coming-of-age story – with hints throughout that this is about more than just one boy growing up. There is a melancholy quality to the nostalgia in Summer of 84 – less prelapsarian idealism, and more the point of the fall itself (a final shot of a Reagan/Bush election sign in a neighbour’s garden subtly underlines this). Unlike The ’Burbs, Summer of 84 really does engage with the horror behind the white picket fence. Well-written, and with great performances, I really enjoyed this one.

My Bloody Valentine (dir. George Mihalka, 1981)


The next screening was another classic slasher, and, as with the other selections, it was an interesting choice. Not least as the festival organizers decided to show the uncut version – with a couple of additional shots/sequences restored that were removed prior to the film’s original release due to violence and gore. My Bloody Valentine is a (sort of) teens-in-peril horror (one of the slew of holiday-themed films that followed Halloween), but it’s not entirely in the clichéd mode you might expect. Set in the mining town of Valentine Bluffs, the film opens with the town planning its first Valentine’s Day dance for twenty years. Such festivities had been abandoned two decades earlier, when mine supervisors left their posts to attend a dance, resulting in a horrific explosion that left miners trapped. The only survivor of the accident – Harry Warden – was driven insane by the experience and subsequently murdered the negligent supervisors. He also vowed to commit further murders if the town ever held a Valentine’s Day dance again. Twenty years on, and Valentines Bluff is throwing caution to the wind and reviving the dance… it isn’t long before the blood starts to flow. A relentless killer in mining gear begins to pick off the townsfolk, leaving grisly gifts in heart-shaped boxes in his wake. Has Harry Warden come back to finish what he started? My Bloody Valentine is rather underappreciated and often-dismissed, but it deserves a bit more attention, not least for its setting and backstory. Valentines Bluff has a grim claustrophobia to it, and there’s an oppressive feel not found in the summer camp/house party genre offerings. While My Bloody Valentine is very much a bit of slasher fun, it’s also got a bit of an edge to it that makes it stands out from the crowd. Great choice!

Short Films Competition Part 2


Another panel of short film screenings next. Clean As You Like (Theresa Varga, 2018) is an off-kilter slapstick comedy about two friends who work as cleaners, and whose relationship is thrown off by the arrival of a man on the scene. Dialogue-free and heavy on the physical comedy, this isn’t really a horror film. Sadly, the humour didn’t work for me. Similarly, Zombie Time (Alfonso Fulgencio, 2018) – a Lego zombie animation – wasn’t really to my taste. The Dollmaker (Al Lougher, 2017) has a bereaved mother turn to a toymaker for a magical solution to her grief – this is nicely done, but a bit predictable. Also very well done is La Noria (Carlos Baena, 2018), an ambitious (and moving) animation. Both Milk (Santiago Menghini, 2018) and Here There Be Monsters (Drew Macdonald, 2018) start off strong, but lack punch. The former has a boy going to the kitchen for a late-night drink, finding his mother there, and then realizing that something’s very wrong. The latter has a bullied girl trapped on a school bus at the end of the day and running into something nasty. I really enjoyed The Blizzard (Alvaro Rodriguez Areny, 2018), an unsettling period piece in which a mother wakes up in a blizzard, separated from her daughter and facing an unspecified military threat. This film made great use of the short film format. Home (Paul Gustavsen, 2018) is an excellent creepypasta-esque film about a woman being woken in the night by her husband coming in from a night out (or has something else come in?). Finally – and the winner of the Méliès d’Argent at this year’s festival – was Skickelsen (Jonas Gramming, 2017): a mysterious man moves into an apartment with an appointment to keep. Stylishly shot and nicely creepy, this was a definite highlight and well-deserved winner.

Friday the 13th (dir. Sean S. Cunningham, 1980)


Next up was the (kind of) signature film of the festival… the original Friday the 13th! Admittedly, we’d already seen Part 3 earlier in the week, but it was time to go back to where it all began. I don’t know whether this film needs much of an introduction – or if there’s much I can say by way of a review that hasn’t already been said. But in the unlikely event that anyone’s reading this review who doesn’t know what happens in Friday the 13th… teen counsellors arrive to set up Camp Crystal Lake for the summer season and are mysteriously (and gorily) picked off one by one. The camp has an unfortunate history – stories of a young boy drowning in 1957, and then the brutal murders of two counsellors the following year, circulate – so this new crop of teens can’t say they haven’t been warned. And yet they pay no heed – they just turn up intending to have fun over the summer (something which, as the slasher genre tells us, is a dangerous thing to do). Given the sprawling franchise that followed, it’s easy to forget that Friday the 13th is, like a lot of non-franchise slashers, a whodunit with multiple suspects, including Crazy Ralph (who wanders around town talking about a ‘death curse’) and friendly camp owner Steve. But the film has a big reveal up its sleeve – and in the event that someone’s reading this who hasn’t seen the film (or the first ten minutes of Scream), I’ll just leave it at that. It’s hard to say what – exactly – makes Friday the 13th so iconic. Perhaps it’s that reveal, perhaps it’s Harry Manfredini’s score. Or perhaps it’s that the film is the absolute essence of the slasher genre and the template for so much that would follow.

Sean S. Cunningham in conversation with Stephen Thrower


The guest-of-honour at this year’s festival was Sean S. Cunningham, producer and director of Friday the 13th (among other things). After the screening of Friday the 13th, we were treated to an ‘audience with’ session, with Cunningham in conversation with Stephen Thrower and taking questions from the audience. This was an interesting session for a number of reasons. There were (as expected) some great anecdotes about Cunningham’s career, the making of Friday the 13th, the making of Last House on the Left, and his work and friendship with Wes Craven. But, also, it was really fascinating to hear a somewhat different perspective on the making of iconic horror films from what I’d heard before. It was clear that Cunningham is – at heart – a producer, rather than an auteur, and so his take on why/how horror films work was quite a different – and, at times, defiantly apolitical – take on the genre.

The Last House on the Left (dir. Wes Craven, 1972)


I wasn’t sure about watching this next one. I’ve seen Last House on the Left before, and I found it a distinctly uncomfortable watch. In case you don’t know, the film was a collaboration between Sean S. Cunningham and Wes Craven, heavily censored (and censured) at the time of its release for its depiction of violence and sadism. Two young women are abducted, tortured and raped by a gang of sociopathic criminals – and then the criminals take shelter in the home of one of the girls’ parents. The sexual violence and humiliation in the torture scenes is intense, and I was very wary about watching this one again. However, the festival organizers were very sensible in putting it on after the Q and A with Cunningham, as it helped to contextualize the film and offer ways to ‘think’ the film’s violence, rather than simply experiencing it. Despite really not enjoying it previously, I’ll admit I was keen to see if the film looked different with this added context and introduction. One of the things that I noted from the Audience with Sean S. Cunningham was the almost incongruous medley of desires that led to the creation of the film: the desire to create a ‘drive-in’ movie that would attract people to the theatre, the desire to rework Ingmar Bergman’s The Virgin Spring with a contemporary American setting, and the desire to comment on (rather than simply show) violence and its aftermath (and, depending on whose take you follow, the desire to comment subtextually on the Vietnam War). This incongruity results in a film that is difficult to read. Is it exploitation horror? Is it a political anti-violence rhetoric? What is the viewer supposed to take from it? Despite the introduction and context, I’m still not sure I know the answers.

The Last House on the Left is an uncomfortable way to end the night, but once again we couldn't quite manage the final screening of the night. This time we sadly had to miss the UK premiere of Party Hard, Die Young (dir. Dominik Hartl, 2018).

One more part of this three-part review to come. My next post will be about the films we saw on Saturday and Sunday.

Thursday 13 December 2018

#40for40: Birthday Celebrations

So I turned 40 in August. I know, I know... I don't look a day over 21. But it's true. I'm now officially middle-aged. I couldn't decide what to do to celebrate. It felt like I should do something exciting and unusual to mark the Big 4-0, but all the ideas I had seemed to be things I've done before. Perhaps that's the problem with being so old... you've already had so many birthdays that you can't think of any celebrations you've not already done. Lol.

Anyway, I eventually came up with the idea of doing 40 small celebrations throughout the month instead of one big one. I thought this would also be a good idea as my friends now come from all the different bits of my looooooong life (I'm so old), and so finding one single activity that people would want to do is impossible. And so I embarked on my #40for40 plans... and here are my 40 celebrations...

1. Lion Club at North Manchester FM


I joined up with some of the other presenters at North Manchester FM who also have August birthdays for a celebration radio show. We took over the station for a couple of hours, shared a few stories, talked about being Leos (or, whether or not we actually believe in star signs), and played a bizarrely eclectic range of music. And we had a birthday cake (made by me)!



You can also listen to our Lion Club show here:



2. Blackpool with Castlerea


I had a day trip to Blackpool with the residents of the care home my mum and brother run. We spent the day wandering along the pier and the prom, and then we had fish and chips before we came home (I didn't have the fish - obviously). It was a lovely day - I do like to be beside the seaside.


3. Vintage Pearls at Stockport Plaza


Me and Rob went to the lovely art deco Stockport Plaza for afternoon tea and a performance of some old-time songs by the Vintage Pearls (who also got the room to sing 'Happy Birthday' to me!). We even had a glass of champagne as well!


4. Port Sunlight


On my birthday itself, Rob took me for a mystery trip out. We went to Port Sunlight! We had a great day looking round the village and museum, and then we visited the Lady Lever Art Gallery. We came home with loads of vintage soaps (and I got a couple of books on model villages in the Industrial Revolution too, because that's just how I roll).


5. Meal at Indian Ocean


After Port Sunlight, Rob took me for dinner at our favourite local restaurant Indian Ocean. And as it was my birthday, I got extra free Baileys!


6. Dinner with my Parents


I went for a family dinner with my parents - and my mum baked me a birthday cake!


7. Cocktails at El Gato Negro


My lovely friend Chris took me out for tapas and cocktails at El Gato Negro on King Street. The cocktails I had were Parma Violet and Lemon Sherbet - and absolutely gorgeous.


8. Cocktail Masterclass at the Fitzgerald


More cocktails! I went on a cocktail masterclass at the Fitzgerald bar in Manchester. Not only did we get a champagne cocktail on arrival, we also learned how to make three cocktails (one of which was a competition) and got an unusual selection of shots. My favourite cocktail was the Devil's Kiss - whisky, chilli aperol, and all served up on some dry ice!


9. Lunch in Edinburgh


With a slightly woolly head from all the cocktails, my next trip out was an ambitious one. Me and my mum drove up to Edinburgh for lunch with our cousin Joy. We had a lovely lunch - and it was great to get chance to see Joy - and we stopped at Biggar for ice cream on the way home. It's a good thing I don't turn 40 everyday... Edinburgh's a long way to drive for lunch!


10. Dinner with my Parents-in-Law


Another family dinner - this time with my parents-in-law. And look at all the cake we had!


11. Strangers on a Train at the Electric Cinema, Birmingham


This is somewhere I'd wanted to go for a long time. The Electric Cinema in Birmingham is the U.K.'s oldest cinema, and as luck would have it they were holding a season of Alfred Hitchcock films around my birthday. Actually, this wasn't really luck - Alfred Hitchcock's birthday is the same day as mine. Anyway, we went to a screening of Strangers on a Train as one of my birthday celebrations - and it was awesome. We went home via Cannock Chase, had a wander in the woods and visited the German Military Cemetery.


12. Lunch at Tampopo


I met my friend Kate for lunch in Manchester. We had some lovely food at Tampopo and then went for coffee.


13. Day Trip to Chester-le-Street


I went up to Chester-le-Street to see my best mate K. We basically spent the day hanging out in Durham and Newcastle, so I don't really have any pictures except these: a massive bowl of tofu and a very handsome cat.



Aaaaand that's all I managed. To be honest, it was exhausting. I don't know how I thought I was going to manage 40 birthday celebrations in a month. I kept meaning to plan more things, maybe extend it over a bit longer, but I was just too knackered to celebrate anymore and I had too much work to do so I just gave up. This must be what 40 feels like.

Sunday 9 December 2018

Review: Abertoir: The International Horror Festival of Wales 2018 (Tuesday and Wednesday)

13th-18th November 2018
Aberystwyth Arts Centre, Wales

We were away at Abertoir horror film festival in Wales last week. We've been wanting to go to the festival for ages, but this year was the first time that work commitments (pretty much) allowed it. And I'm so glad that we were able to make it this year - what a brilliant festival! Abertoir is a warm and welcoming festival, and within a few hours of arriving we really felt at home. But it's also a well-organized event, and the programme is very well put together. I was really impressed by the thought that clearly went into this year's line-up: a good selection of classics complimented new releases and a couple of UK premieres... and a few genuine surprises too.

Abertoir is a six-day festival, so we saw a LOT of films. And a lot of these are recommendations, so I'm planning to review all the titles we saw in November. To make it a bit more manageable, I'm going to do the review in three parts. First up... here are the films we saw on Tuesday and Wednesday.

Tuesday 13th November


Sleepaway Camp (dir. Robert Hiltzik, 1983)


As this was the thirteenth Abertoir festival, and Friday the 13th was on the menu, the whole festival had a slasher theme, with some interesting selections made from the subgenre. The first screening was Sleepaway Camp – which set a quirky, off-beat tone to the proceedings. Sleepaway Camp is a cult classic, niche even by slasher standards, and I was surprised to find that even my horror aficionado husband had never heard of it (and it was quite the challenge not to let any spoilers slip beforehand). It’s hard to know what to say about Sleepaway Camp to do justice to its off-key mix of high camp and horror tropes. The film begins with a happy day out on the lake turning to tragedy, as a family is mown down by a rogue speedboat. A father and child are killed, but another child survives. Fast forward eight years, and we’re at Camp Arawak for the summer. Awkward teen Angela is attending the camp for the first time with her cousin Ricky. Angela is painfully shy and so is mercilessly bullied by Queen Bee Judy and malicious counsellor Meg. But an unseen killer is picking off teens (mostly the more unpleasant ones). Camp owner Mel Costic – apparently taking a page from Jaws’ Mayor Larry Vaughn’s playbook – is determined to brush off the violent murders to ensure the summer continues as planned, but the killings just don’t stop. The whole thing builds to a climax that has to be seen to be believed, and which will leave you questioning if this is exploitation, innovation or something somewhere in between. Chock-full of 80s fashion disasters (such tight shorts! such high side ponytails!), hammy acting and murdered teens, Sleepaway Camp is a wild ride. And it was a great start to our first Abertoir festival.

In Fabric (dir. Peter Strickland, 2018)


The first new film of the festival was In Fabric. In a nutshell, this is a film about a haunted dress. But that brief summary does a disservice to Strickland’s highly stylized – often overwhelmingly so – and sometimes disturbing critique of consumerism. The film introduces us to Sheila, a downtrodden single mother to a teen son, who has a boring job in a bank and uses a lonely hearts dating service. Sheila buys a dress from a ubiquitous but sinister department store – and things go badly wrong. Again, this doesn’t really do justice to how Strickland’s film unfolds. In many ways, it is the aesthetic – rather than the plot – which is most important here. Firstly, the film plays around with ostensibly ‘period’ detail and anachronism (a telling example: Sheila has an analogue tape answerphone, but a phone number that begins ‘01’), creating a feeling of timelessness, but not in a reassuring or positive way. Secondly, the film’s design is both minutely detailed and gloriously overblown: Sheila’s place of work and uniform are intricately mundane, which contrasts with the Gothic Victoriana of the department store’s creepy assistants. Other contrasts are used to strong effect in the film, such as dialogue (the juxtaposition of the stilted, comical awkwardness of Sheila’s dates, the daft management speak of her bosses, and the uncomfortable verbosity of the shop assistants) and tone (the contrast of sad silliness during the dates with the Grand Guignol-esque blood and disturbing eroticism in the department store after hours). Does this work? Mostly – yes, I think it does. In Fabric isn’t a horror narrative as such, but it utilizes generic story elements and visual tropes to undeniably powerful effect. My criticism would be that it’s somewhat overlong and loses its pacing once Sheila’s story ends and the dress acquires a new owner.

Piercing (dir. Nicolas Pesce, 2018)


Piercing is an adaptation of Ryū Murakami’s 1994 novel of the same name (translated into English in 2007). It’s the story of Reed, a married man with a young child, who fantasises about killing a woman with an ice pick. Admittedly, in the opening scenes, I did have doubts about whether this film was for me. The last horror film festival we went to (way back in 2015) became a bit of chore, as it felt like every single film we saw featured (sexual, gratuitous) violence against women. When Reed sets about making his fantasy a reality, checking into a hotel and testing out the effects of chloroform, I had a sinking feeling things were heading in the same direction. Oh me of little faith! Piercing was going to take us on a very different journey. Reed hires an escort – Jackie (played brilliantly by Mia Wasikowska) – who arrives at his hotel room, uncomfortable and awkward. Her client, too, is uncomfortable and awkward, and the audience waits for the violence to begin… But then the film takes an unexpected turn, when Jackie’s own psychological issues come to the surface. The film’s design is stylish (and stylized – though not to the same extent as In Fabric), and the back-and-forth between the two protagonists also has a sense of choreographed style (although we see some other characters, this is essentially a two-hander) that flips the script from predator-prey to a twisted pas de deux. Nevertheless, this is not a character study – we learn little about Reed, and even less about Jackie. Instead, Piercing emerges as a viciously glossy, but also funny and touching, tale of two messed-up people finding a way to deal with their mess. No spoilers, but I found the ending (and particularly the last line) really quite a satisfying conclusion.

Sadly, our stamina isn't what it used to be, so we had to skip the final screening of the day in favour of sleep. The last film on Tuesday was Puppet Master: The Littlest Reich (dir. Tommy Wiklund and Sonny Laguna, 2018).

Wednesday 14th November


The Tokoloshe (dir. Jerome Pikwane, 2018)


First film of Wednesday was The Tokoloshe, a South African horror inspired by a creature from Zulu mythology. Busi (Petronella Tshuma) is a poor young woman who arrives in Johannesburg looking for work. She manages to get a job at a run-down hospital, but is immediately beset both by the supernatural malevolence of the tokoloshe that’s apparently menacing the hospital’s children’s ward, and by the more human threat of a predatory boss. Desperate for money so that she can ‘save’ her sister, Busi is forced to stay at the hospital as things become increasingly violent and frightening. I really enjoyed The Tokoloshe – it was very skilful in its evocation of Gothic horror and the claustrophobia of Busi’s situation. The film’s bilingual (English/Zulu) dialogue also worked very well, with Busi’s isolation being conjured through the continued pressure to speak English to those in authority. One particular scene, when Busi attempts to flee on a bus, really highlighted the way language works in the film, with her English pleas to the bus driver falling on deaf ears before a voice offers assistance in Zulu – even as an Anglophone I felt the sheer relief that came with hearing Busi’s own language spoken. If I had a criticism of the film, it would be that it tries to do a little too much. The horror set pieces in the hospital are very well done, but these are only part of the story. Busi and her sister’s backstory is also revealed through flashback, and there is commentary on social and economic issues in Johannesburg as well. At times, it feels like the film tries to tell too many stories and this affects pacing. Nevertheless, the ending does an excellent job of bringing the threads together and revealing the underlying truth of the horror assailing Busi.

UK Premiere: Occult Bolshevism (dir. Hiroshi Takahashi, 2018)


Occult Bolshevism is a Japanese film, written and directed by Hiroshi Takahashi (the writer of Ringu). Our screening was prefixed by a short recorded interview by Takahashi, where he spoke of being inspired by classic British ghost stories (in the writing of both Ringu and Occult Bolshevism). We also had a brief intro from the festival organizers, who said that – despite being written by the same man – the film we were about to watch was definitely not in the same vein of horror as his more famous work. I’ll admit I was quite glad about that, because – shock horror! – I’m not really a fan of Ringu (don’t @ me). The organizers were right, though. Occult Bolshevism is a quite different type of tale – and I really enjoyed it. As part of a forbidden experiment into psychological/paranormal phenomena (it’s not made explicitly clear at the start what the nature of the experiment is), a group of people come together in an apparently abandoned industrial facility. As with classic ghost stories, they each take it in turn to tell their own tale of supernatural experience, which are recorded/monitored. But all this is being conducted under looming portraits of Communist leaders and is prefaced with a group rendition of the Bolshevik Party Anthem – and throughout the film the experiment is couched in terms of ‘spiritual revolution’. Occult Bolshevism is a weird and off-kilter ghost story that carries you along for its ride. I’m not going to pretend that I fully understand the ending, but it’s certainly a dramatic and unsettling climax that draws together disparate elements of the stories previously told. For me, the film was at its most powerful when the experiment’s participants narrated their tales – sparsely shot and without diegetic music, these sequences perfectly captured the essence of the ghost story.

Offsite Screening: Friday the 13th Part 3 in 3D (dir. Steve Miner, 1982)


And now for a bit of an ‘event screening’. Abertoir have a tradition of holding off-site screenings during their annual festivals – it was one of the things that initially caught our attention about their programme. This year, in-keeping with this year’s theme, it was a screening of Friday the 13th Part 3 in 3D at a remote barn in the Welsh countryside (well, not entirely remote – but let’s not worry too much about that). We were advised to wrap up warm, transported to the location by coach, and then given hockey masks with 3D glasses attached (a brilliant little touch, although given my hairdo and spectacles, I sadly had to detach my glasses so I could actually wear them). After a couple of other little surprises – including a nice little ‘I’ll be right back’ moment from an ‘audience member’ – we settled in for some slasher fun. Watching in a group is really the only way to enjoy a 3D film, and there were plenty of giggles and groans as various things flew out of the screen towards us. Arguably, Part 3 isn’t a particularly exciting or memorable instalment in the franchise, but I thoroughly enjoyed this screening. Afterwards, we stepped outside the barn for drinks, food and a bonfire. However, this did give me the distinct impression that we’d crossed our horror subgenres. Huddling around the bonfire in the darkness of the British countryside felt more folk horror than summer camp slasher – I wasn’t scared of Jason at this point, but I worried that someone might have to be sacrificed to ensure next year’s harvest. Fortunately, everyone survived (I think) and we got back on the bus to head back to the festival venue. This was an excellent, fun event screening – perfectly organized and a great addition to the programme.

Tumbbad (dir. Rahi Anil Barve, Anand Gandhi and Adesh Prasad, 2018)


When we got back to the festival venue, it was time for another new film. Tumbbad is a Hindi-language historical fantasy/horror with visual and narrative nods to the epic. The film begins with a narration of the story of the Goddess of Prosperity, and of her greedy son Hastar. The other gods attacked Hastar, but his mother saved him – on the condition that he was never worshipped and remained forgotten by humanity. But the village of Tumbbad did not forget him, and so they were cursed with eternal rains. The film’s story is divided into three sections. It begins in 1918, when Vinayak’s mother is servant to the local lord Sarkar. As well as tending to the house and Sarkar’s monstrous ancestor (seriously monstrous… she’s kept chained up in a basement), Vinayak’s mother performs sexual services for Sarkar – who is the father of her two sons – in the hope of acquiring one of Hastar’s gold coins. When Sarkar dies, she intends to leave Tumbbad for Pune, but her son has become fascinated by the possibility of discovering more of Hastar’s treasure. The story then moves to the 1930s, and the adult Vinayak’s return to Tumbbad and discovery of the treasure; the final chapter is set in 1947, when the now-rich Vinayak begins to train his son to extract the gold in his place. Storywise, Tumbbad is a fable: Vinayak desires wealth, then he realises his desire, then he faces the consequences. But it’s the film’s visual style that really makes it. Lavishly rendered, with exquisitely detailed sets and location shooting, Tumbbad is both sensual and disturbing. The eternal rains of Tumbbad village were very well done, to the point where you actually feel drenched just watching it. Tumbbad is a classy and evocative period piece with a timeless fabulist moral.

And despite our best intentions, we were once again too shattered to stay for the last screening of the day. This time, we missed Slumber Party Massacre (dir. Amy Holden Jones, 1982).

My next post will have reviews of the films we saw on Thursday and Friday.

Saturday 8 December 2018

My Year in Books 2018: November

How exciting - I'm just one month away from having stuck to my New Year's Resolution for an entire year! I've never done that before! Sadly, though, I didn't actually get time for much reading in November, so there's only one review on today's post. I anticipate I'll catch up in December though, as I usually read quite a bit over Christmas... I guess you'll find out in my next post!

If you want to see my reviews for the rest of the year, you can find them here: January, February, March, April, May, June, July, August, September, October

Shroud for a Nightingale by P.D. James (1971)


Okay, so I did say that I wasn’t going to read any more Adam Dalgleish novels. But I spent most of November with a horrible cold, and I just wanted to read something comforting – and my comfort reading is Golden Age detective fiction. In my poorly brain, I thought this would be sort of the same thing. The book begins promisingly enough. Two student nurses are killed at a training school, and Adam Dalgleish is called in to investigate. There is a sense of claustrophobia, of a closed little world in which the suspects operate, of secretive undercurrents and things left unsaid. But that’s pretty much it, I’m afraid. James’s work is incredibly evocative of place and setting, but her novels are ultimately unsatisfying mysteries. While there’s plenty of exploration of the world of nursing here – with some judgemental commentary, and an obsessive need to catalogue every early morning or late drink a character has (something I noticed in Cover Her Face as well, though at least there it was part of the plot) – there are no clues that the reader might use to solve the mystery. In fact, the ending comes quite out of the blue. There are also a couple of chapters that seem to belong to a different book: the first, which focuses in detail on a character who plays no part in the story, and the unpleasant chapter which details how Dalgleish’s sergeant gets information out of an older woman. Don’t think I’m a James fan.

Friday 23 November 2018

My Year in Books 2018: October

Okay, it's another delayed post from me. But better late than never, I guess. Another month of sticking to my New Year's resolution. I found time to read four novels for pleasure in October (though I don't appear to have been very varied in my genre choice - it's all crime fiction this month!), so here are my short reviews of the titles I read.

(You can read all the other posts from this year here: January, February, March, April, May, June, July, August, September)

I'll Keep You Safe by Peter May (2018)


I’m a big fan of Peter May’s novels. I loved the Lewis trilogy and reread the Enzo MacLeod books a couple of times. My mum and my mother-in-law are both fans as well, and it just so happened that both of them got a copy of I’ll Keep You Safe at the same time – and then they both offered to lend me their copy when they’d finished, so I raced them! My mum won (just), so I read her copy of the book. This is a book that I’d heard May talk about prior to its completion. He described it as ‘From Paris to Harris’ (though it turns out that the Hebridean portion of the book is set in Lewis, not Harris). Ruairidh and Niamh Macfarlane are the owners and creators of the Ranish Tweed fabric brand. During a trip to Paris Fashion Week, Niamh learns that Ruairidh has been having an affair, but then almost immediately witnesses her husband and his lover killed by a car bomb. She returns to Lewis bereft, but – of course – there are further revelations to come. I do enjoy Peter May’s writing, but this wasn’t one of my favourites. I loved the flashback sections describing Ruairidh and Niamh’s relationship, but the ‘present day’ crime chapters were a bit plodding and predictable. It’s a shame, because I think I probably would have been more than happy to have read a book just about the Macfarlanes and Ranish Tweed (though that might have been less marketable!).

The Secret Place by Tana French (2014)


Earlier in the year, I read a few of Tana French’s Dublin Murder Squad novels out of sequence, so managed to miss out the fifth one. This month, I finally read The Secret Place. The book sees the return of Stephen Moran (a minor character in Faithful Place) and teams him up with Antoinette Conway, a prickly and unpopular member of the Murder Squad, for the first time. The book begins with Holly Mackey – daughter of the main detective in Faithful Place – telling Moran about a development in a year-old murder investigation at her school. Moran grudgingly passes the information on to Conway, but on the understanding that he’ll be able to join the investigation. The two visit Holly’s boarding school to reopen the inquiry into the murder of Chris Harper, a pupil at the neighbouring boys’ school. The prime suspects are two cliques of girls – Holly and her friends, and a rival group – and the book switches between the police investigation and flashbacks to Holly’s gang’s involvement with Chris Harper, but also (more significantly) with each other. Like In the Woods, it’s as much about friendship as it is about a murder investigation. It’s not quite as good as In the Woods and Broken Harbour, but I preferred it to The Trespasser. Oh, and ignore any reviews that criticise the so-called ‘unexplained supernatural element’ – there’s a single, beautiful sentence that explains everything towards the end of the book, which reminded me just why I’m a fan of French’s work.

The Sleeping and the Dead by Ann Cleeves (2001)


Clearly, I wasn’t feeling very experimental this month so I seem to have stuck to writers I know. The Sleeping and the Dead is one of Cleeves’s standalone novels, so not part of the Vera or Shetland series. The book begins with the discovery of a long-dead body in a lake. Detective Peter Porteous (who is quite an unusual detective, not because he has a lot of eccentric quirks, but because he’s so calm and self-contained throughout the investigation) quickly narrows down the possibilities for identification, before concluding that the body must be that of Michael Grey, a young man who hasn’t been seen since the 1970s. Michael was an enigmatic man, who arrived in the local area to live with foster parents in his final year at school. No one appears to know where Michael came from or who his family was. The book switches between Porteous’s investigation and the story of Hannah Morton, a prison officer who was once Michael’s girlfriend. Hannah reminisces on her relationship with Michael, but also finds herself drawn into the investigation more directly (and dangerously) than she’d like. I was really drawn into this story and found myself engaged with Hannah’s story (and the mysterious Michael, of course). However, I’m not sure the mystery really went anywhere. It’s definitely a page-turner, but the denouement and explanation was a little bit of an anti-climax. There was also a bit of a tricksy coincidence that had to be swallowed on the journey to the resolution.

Unnatural Causes by P.D. James (1967)


Okay, I know I sort of concluded last time that P.D. James wasn’t for me. But I got a really nasty cold towards the end of the month, and I just wanted some comfort reading (aka a whodunnit). I couldn’t find any Golden Age stuff that I fancied, so I thought I’d give James another whirl. And this one started off well. Adam Dalgliesh (admittedly not my favourite literary detective) is staying with his Aunt Jane (not Jane Marple) in Suffolk when one of the neighbours is found murdered and mutilated. The victim was a crime novelist, and he appears to have been killed with a method taken from his own writing. The other residents of the little village are all suspects, though some big crime types in that London also drift in and out of the frame. I loved the chapters in the village, with the vague air of menace that surrounded even mundane social interactions. However, the plot was at once convoluted and underexplained. I’m still not totally sure why that particular far-fetched method of murder (and the mutilation) was chosen. James isn’t too hot on clues (unlike my beloved Agatha), but I still guessed the culprit here. I also don’t quite get what was going on with Dalgliesh’s personal life. Did he break up with his girlfriend at the end? Or not? And why was he being so randomly aloof? To be fair, I’m probably going to stick with the Dalgliesh novels now – but just for completism.

Thursday 22 November 2018

OUT NOW: The Black Room Manuscripts Volume Four, ed. by J.R. Park and Tracy Fahey (The Sinister Horror Company, 2018)

A new collection of tales of terror, including 'Planning Permission', a story of municipal horror from yours truly...

Some words are born in shadows.

Some tales told only in whispers.

Under the paper thin veneer of our sanity is a world that exists. Hidden just beyond in plain sight, waiting to consume you should you dare stray from the street-lit paths that sedate our fears.

For centuries the Black Room has stored stories of these encounters, suppressing the knowledge of the rarely seen. Protecting the civilised world from its own dark realities.

The door to the Black Room has once again swung open to unleash twenty four masterful tales of the macabre from the twisted minds of a new breed of horror author.

The Black Room holds many secrets.

Dare you enter… one final time?

Contents:

Foreword by Michael David Wilson
Prologue by Tracy Fahey and J.R. Park
That Thing I Did by Tracy Fahey
Eating the Dream by K.A. Laity
A Clear Day in a Season of Storms by Simon Avery
The Hanging Boy by Gary McMahon
Mam's Girl by J.L. George
Tears of Honey by John McNee
Deciper by Daniel Marc Chant
Tap, Tap... by Marie O'Regan
Black Silk by Benedict J. Jones
Dragged Down by Ramsey Campbell
Palace of the Damned by C.L. Raven
Brooks Pond by Mark West
Planning Permission by Hannah Kate
Shrivelled Tongues of Dead Horses by Erik Hofstatter
Death Wish by Margrét Helgadóttir
Size Isn't Everything by James Everington
Pain Has a Voice by Stephen Bacon
Swimming Out to Sea by Penny Jones
Reanimation Channel by Mark Cassell
Craft Ail by Duncan P. Bradshaw
Dr Zwigli's Last Paper by Elizabeth Davis
Laurel by Terry Grimwood
Tide Will Tell by V.H. Leslie
The Last Horror Story by Tracy Fahey and J.R. Park
Epilogue by Tracy Fahey and J.R. Park
Afterword by Jim Mcleod

All proceeds from the sale of this book will be donated to Refuge. For more information, or to buy a copy, please visit the Sinister Horror Company website.