By Keri O’Shea
Well, let’s see: my body aches, I am having to wean myself back onto solid food after giving this up completely by early on Saturday and the sunlight hurts my eyes. Yep, it can only have been a horror movie festival which has wreaked such havoc upon my mortal frame. Horror fests are the new endurance tests (or at least, they are the way I do them) so I hope you’ll forgive me if this festival report is refracted through the aftermath of three days of excess…
Any festival which has been going for two decades must be doing something very right and in Dead By Dawn’s case – although I haven’t been attending for much of that time – one of the things that stands out is that you don’t tend to see the ‘big horrors’ of the year screening there. On occasion a film, indie or otherwise, will hit the scene and play every horror festival within a short period of time. Dead By Dawn doesn’t do that, so the films you see there are likely to be unusual choices. As for this year, the programming was absolutely stellar, easily the best I’ve seen there, and struck a good balance between classics like The Brood and a Frank Henenlotter double bill (more on this anon!) and strongly-written independents. Reviews of some of these will follow hot on the heels of this post, but it’s interesting that two of the very best of the films on offer – The Battery and Mon Ami – took the concept of the buddy movie and spliced it with horror elements so that in both of these films, we have male friendship being put through the wringer, but the end results – though both hysterically funny – are very different. It just goes to show how much variety and depth is still possible around ostensibly tried-and-tested themes and that organiser Adele is bloody good at spotting it.
Short films are, of course, also an important part of the picture. Amongst my favourites this year were La Ricetta (‘The Recipe’), where a little boy’s ‘lesson’ in food preparation turns into a nightmare where human and animal flesh become interchangeable. I also loved Graveyard Feeder, another pitch-perfect horror comedy starring one of the best working character actors today, Sean Bridgers, who is trying with limited success to stop a necromancer feastin’ on the inmates of the local cemetery – oh, and he’s working alongside his deceased pop, whose soul he has to save too. In execution, a sharp script and great acting push this into a different league, and it would be nice if this was the first excursion of many in this fictional universe. It was also superb to see Fist of Jesus – which we featured here at Brutal As Hell a few weeks ago – on the big screen, in an auditorium full of people who were in just the right frame of mind to receive the Good Word, and also to see zombies being dispatched with fish. This film also led to some creative thinking in the bar later on; why not other religious figures/body parts movies? We came up with a few…but you don’t want to hear about that. Moving on!
This year’s guest of honour was none other than Frank Henenlotter, king of body horror comedy. What a thoroughly lovely man, and a true old-school raconteur too: it was a lot of fun hearing him speak about the making of Basket Case and Brain Damage, which screened together on Friday night. Before we got to the films themselves, though, Frank was keen to get us in the right frame of mind to appreciate two films about sentient warped parasitic beings – this was achieved through the judicious application of a friend of Frank’s, a sideshow magician by the name of Albert Cadabra, who got us all in the mood by swallowing a lot of latex and hammering a fork into his face (which worked a treat) and via Dead By Dawn’s ‘dead pics’ competition. For anyone who isn’t aware, Mr. Henenlotter makes a habit and a hobby of photographing himself being, well, dead in a lot of different places, and the idea was that festival attendees could submit their own dead pics, with the prize for the winner being to have a dead pic taken with Frank himself. The winner, a man who appeared as a corpse in a photo with his kids happily playing around him, utterly deserved to win, though all the entries were good (being dead on stairwells seemed to be something of a theme – not sure why that was!). Then, the whole auditorium appeared in an en masse dead pic. Good, wholesome fun for all the family.
The festival also featured a presentation by House of Psychotic Women author Kier-La Janisse, a short story reading by author and filmmaker Frazer Lee, and the now-legendary Shit Films Amnesty, each film replete with notes giving lots of back story and excuses as to how the films ended up in people’s possession in the first place…
Sadly, real-world commitments meant I couldn’t hang around until the end of the festival, and so I missed out on seeing Evil Dead II on the big screen, which is an especial shame as I could have used a palate cleanser after seeing the remake recently – but, ahem, I think we’ve said our piece on that front already. Dead by Dawn’s 20th anniversary played out with style, the festival is a massive credit to Adele and her team and I hope there will be many more to come. I will need the next year to recover, though.
But as I’m doing that, let’s talk about some of the films I saw…
DEAD BY DAWN 20TH ANNIVERSARY FESTIVAL TRAILER from Sketchbook Pictures on Vimeo.