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Survival is a women’s game: Horror Channel FrightFest 2017

Fashionista
Fashionista

Horror Channel FrightFest 2017

24-28 August 2017

Leicester Square, London

FrightFest website

This year’s edition of Horror Channel FrightFest was dominated by stories of female survivors.

In these times of increased uncertainty and diffuse dangers, it is perhaps no wonder that stories of survival dominated this year’s edition of Horror Channel FrightFest. More specifically, it was female survival that appeared to be a recurring preoccupation in the work of the mostly male directors (only two feature films in the programme were directed by women).

The two high points of the festival, Cold Hell and Lowlife, both centred on complex, resilient and flawed women who must face deadly threats with only their own strength to rely on. In Cold Hell, directed by Stefan Ruzowitzky (The Counterfeiters), Turkish-Austrian Thai-boxing champion Özge faces daily racism and sexism in her job as a taxi driver. When she becomes the target of a serial killer, she finds that neither her family nor the police will help her. Uncompromisingly stubborn and more comfortable with punches than words, she is an engaging mix of toughness and vulnerability. Despite the implausibility of some of the plot lines, Cold Hell is exhilarating both because of its efficient, tensely paced action and its deeper emotional and political resonance.

The debut feature of director Ryan Prows, Lowlife also focuses on the plight of people who live on the margins of society, unprotected by the rule of law that most of us take for granted. An excellent ensemble piece created by a tightly knit cast and crew, it weaves three interconnected stories that follow a luchador, a pregnant drug addict and an ex-con as they confront a ruthlessly brutal organ trafficker. At the heart of the film is the relationship between two hardened and troubled women, who must face their demons and learn to join forces to defeat them. Irrepressibly joyful and horrifically brutal, like Cold Hell it uses a genre framework to pass comment on some very real and urgent issues.

Although it also appears to centre on a female survivor, Korean hit The Villainess is the exact opposite of Cold Hell. Shallow and one-dimensional, The Villainess has none of the psychological truth and social relevance of Stefan Ruzowitzky’s film, and its attempt to ground the action in personal drama only results in cloying sentimentality. Even as a straightforward action film, it is disappointing. The opening first-person corridor fight is a substandard retread of Oldboy with a POV gimmick that detracts, rather than enhances, the action; as for the climactic final confrontation, its impact is deadened by the over-reliance on CGI effects.

Less flashy and more thoughtful, Colin Minihan’s It Stains the Sand Red offered an unusual slant on the apocalyptic zombie genre, focusing on a cocaine-sniffing, booze-addled bad girl as she attempts to escape from LA across the desert. As she journeys through the scorched landscape, a strange kind of relationship starts to develop between her and the zombie who doggedly follows her, and this, together with memories of her previous life, causes her to radically reassess the choices she has made. As in Cold Hell and Lowlife, the female lead is characterized by a mixture of strength and weakness, and by an unshakeable determination to survive, her past proving to be both help and hindrance in that aim.

Interestingly, in all three films, the female survivors must fight not only for themselves, but also to protect a vulnerable dependent. Each film explores the complexities of the character’s relationship to her respective dependent, probing social expectations of women’s nurturing role from diverse angles.

One of the least savoury aspects that emerged in relation to the female survival theme, however, was the use of rape scenes to make a point in some of the films. The unnecessarily extensive depiction of sexual assault marred the otherwise thoughtful It Stains the Sand Red. The demonstration of the character’s capacity for survival could have been made just as efficiently with a shorter, less crudely exploitative scene. Even more troublingly, Andrés Goteira’s coldly smug Dhogs disingenuously highlighted the sadism of voyeuristic audiences while indulging in the nasty abuse of its female-survivor character, and in her degradation from attractive, free-spirited, sexually liberated woman to humiliated, whimpering, multiply brutalised victim. It is a point that could have been made with less misogyny, and more originality.

In contrast, writer-director Simon Rumley offered a stylish, intricate and richly faceted portrayal of a woman in meltdown in Fashionista. The obstacles that April must overcome may not be quite as dramatic as the ones listed above, but they are no less painful and destructive. A fetishistic lover of clothes, April loses sight of herself after a terrible betrayal and must fight for her psychological survival. Amanda Fuller, who was the heart of Rumley’s excellent Red White and Blue, gives an achingly raw performance, its emotional power augmented by the fragmented editing – the film is dedicated to Nic Roeg and its style recalls Bad Timing in particular. Although the concluding message is a little simplistic, overall Fashionista is an affecting exploration of heartbreak and fragile self-fashioning, shot through with disturbing intimations of the darkness that runs just under the surface of everyday life.

Virginie Sélavy

Horror Channel FrightFest 2016 Review

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The Love Witch

Horror Channel FrightFest 2016

25-29 August 2016

Vue Shepherd’s Bush, London

FrightFest website

The festival opened with the poetic and brutal Southern Gothic tale My Father Die, kicking off a father-child theme that bookended the festival, being also the focus of closing film Train to Busan. Although director Sean Brosnan went somewhat overboard with the Gothicness, My Father Die compellingly tells the tale of Asher, a deaf young man traumatised by the events of his childhood, who must fight off the ogre-like figure of his monstrous father (the child-eating Titan Kronos, father of Zeus, is referenced at the beginning).
At the other end of the festival, and in a completely different genre, Korean zombie action film Train to Busan was concerned with a career-obsessed father and his unhappy little girl. Representing everything that is wrong with capitalist big business, the father is forced to reassess his ruthless, selfish principles as the passengers of the train they are travelling in become infected with a virus that turns them into rabid zombies. The father-daughter relationship provides the emotional core of this efficient action horror film, but develops in a way that is far too sentimental. Surprisingly, this big Korean box-office success was directed by Yeon Sang-ho, who gave us one of the harshest, most harrowing films of recent years, high school animé The King of Pigs, which, although it centred on young boys, had not one ounce of sentimentality about it. Yeon Sang-ho also made another zombie film this year, this one in animation form, Seoul Station, which sounds closer to The King of Pigs in its themes and approach than Train to Busan.

Parental anxiety dominated the festival, with mothers taking centre stage in the disappointing Argentine thriller White Coffin (particularly marred by its puzzlingly ill-judged sound design), the atmospheric Danish pregnancy horror Shelley, and the excellent Iranian tale of evil Under the Shadow, which mixed political and otherworldly terrors in a tightly wound-up and emotionally charged feminist drama. A different type of feminist enquiry was found in The Love Witch, in which director Anna Biller plays the title character, who has fashioned herself into what men want using magic in order to find love. The film is a gorgeous-looking, meticulously designed throwback to 1960s cinema that revisits that period from a female angle, but its extremely self-conscious approach does not produce any truly challenging or fresh commentary on sexual politics.

From families to houses: another theme that emerged from this year’s festival was the mazes of the mind, with Laura Casabé’s convoluted plunge into the artistic mind Benavidez’s Case, Darren Lynn Bousman’s Abattoir and French TV mini-series Beyond the Walls. In Abattoir, a journalist begins to investigate when whole rooms where crimes have been committed are removed from houses recently purchased. The premise was very appealing, the idea of mixing up eras was nicely disorientating, but the hotch-potch of ingredients failed to cohere into a meaningful whole and the acting and direction had that lifeless, sanitized slickness that has become typical of American horror productions these days. By contrast, Beyond the Walls intelligently constructed an oppressive labyrinthine architecture of the mind that worked both as a psychological space and as a nightmarish world of dread.

Other types of confined spaces explored transgressive relationships, as in American psychological thriller Pet and psychedelic Mexican delirium We Are the Flesh. Pet had the merit to try to do something different but that was also the problem: it tried too hard and some of the twists in plot and characterisation were too self-consciously contrived. At the other end of the scale, Emiliano Rocha Minter’s debut, while inspired by literary masters of transgression, was made with the guts and delivered an intensely visceral punch that few films can equal. It was by far the most accomplished, imaginative, coherent and radical film of the festival.

Virginie Sélavy

Film4 FrightFest 2014

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FrightFest 2014

15th Film4 FrightFest

21-25 August 2014

London, UK

FrightFest website

The first edition of Film4 FrightFest in its new venue on Leicester Square, the Vue, was a resounding success, with an impressive line-up of films, terrific guests such as John McNaugton, Alan Moore and Jörg Buttgereit, and a lively sense of community. Stylistically and thematically, the programme was diverse, ranging from witty horror comedies to emotionally weighty thrillers and mind-boggling science fiction. After years of zombie domination, the monster of predilection this year was the werewolf, while children in peril and dangerous lovers also featured heavily and there was an underlying current of concern with the medium of film itself.

The festival opened with Adam Wingard’s wildly entertaining homage to 80s slasher/action flicks The Guest, about a mysterious soldier who ingratiates himself into the lives of a family after bringing them a message from their dead son with whom he served in Afghanistan. After a tense, enigmatic first part, the story shifted into black comedy, turning into a fun popcorn horror movie – which was very enjoyable, but it would be nice to see Wingard return to the more serious territory of A Horrible Way to Die at some point. Following the opposite trajectory, Faults started as a comedy about a washed-out cult expert who attempts to de-programme a young woman controlled by a mysterious cult, but turned into an increasingly strange and riveting face-off between the characters, in which roles become reversed. Also of note among the more comedic offerings, the hilarious and bloody Housebound from New Zealand was a blast, with clever twists and hugely satisfying characters, led by delinquent ball of rage Kylie and her well-meaning but clueless chatterbox mother.

The greatest find of the festival was undoubtedly Jennifer Kent’s wonderfully creepy and poignant monster story The Babadook. There were more children in peril in Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer director John McNaughton’s return to the big screen, The Harvest, a chilling autumnal fairy tale of sorts.

Fabrice Du Welz’s intense take on The Honeymoon Killers story Alleluia was another heavyweight of the festival and the most accomplished of the unsettling psycho-sexual thrillers in the programme. Ate De Jong’s Deadly Virtues used bondage to explore the bonds of marriage in a story of home invasion with a twist. Despite its flaws, it was a captivating film with ideas and originality. Marriage was also under scrutiny in simmering two-hander Honeymoon. The dark rape-revenge thriller Julia investigated violent catharsis and female empowerment in interesting, if rather muddled ways – director Matthew A. Brown did not seem entirely sure of where he was taking his story. On a lighter note, Hitoshi Matsumoto took a delirious approach to S&M in R100, an insane Japanese comedy about a middle-aged widower who gets more than he bargained for when he joins an underground club whose dominatrixes include The Queen of Spit in an eye-popping musical sequence and The Queen of Gobbling…

With a greater diversity of complex characters, in particular female, than in previous years, the programme also interestingly reflected a strong male anxiety. Deadly Virtues made a point about the wife earning more money than her husband, an important element in the shifting dynamic of their marriage. In the same way, Ivan Kavanagh’s The Canal added a twist to its familiar jealous husband story in that the wife is the one with the high-powered job while his job, seen as lowly, is dismissed by other characters. With physical castration featuring in a number of films in the programme (Julia being the most notable), there seemed to be a simmering unease about the place of men in marriage and society, and a fear of sexual and social emasculation.

The Canal was one of a handful of films concerned with its own medium, probing the ghostly quality of film itself. In R100, the story of the widower is a film being made within the film – and shown to flabbergasted executives. The excellent occult-tinged Hollywood ambition tale Starry Eyes focused on a would-be actress who sells her soul to a satanic production company for stardom. VHS Viral continued the found footage franchise with a great segment by Nacho Vigalondo while Jessica Cameron’s Truth or Dare took on reality TV with the same subtlety as the shows it satirizes. Among the documentaries, David Gregory’s fascinating Lost Soul – The Doomed Journey of Richard Stanley’s Island of Dr. Moreau was one of the most talked about films of the festival.

It was great to see werewolves used to dig into a variety of themes, even if the results were not always fully convincing. The Samurai, by German director Till Kleinert, was an intriguing, although heavy-handed take on queerness in a small town. It had a very memorable character in the transvestite sword-wielding lone wolf maniac who leads the solitary young local policeman into a journey of bloody self-discovery. Another interesting angle came from Adrian Garcia Bogliano in Late Phases, which stars the brilliant Nick Damici as a cranky blind veteran who moves into a retirement community terrorised by a mysterious creature. With most of its characters above the age of 60, it was a fairly brave, original and entertaining film about ageing, and how to face death with dignity.

Science fiction had a strong presence in the programme this year with Nacho Vigalondo’s mind-puzzler Open Windows, The Signal which closed the festival in beautiful, if somewhat mystifying manner, and James Ward’s convoluted chiller Coherence presented by the Duke Mitchell Film Club. For the first time, the Duke Mitchell brought their inimitable film party to FrightFest, invading one of the cinemas on the Saturday night with their anarchic mix of outlandish clips, excellent guests and wild shenanigans, which was much enjoyed by the packed auditorium.

Virginie Sélavy