By Kit Rathenar
You’d think it wouldn’t be that difficult to review a film festival when you’ve got a reviewer actually living in the right town and another one available a mere hour up the road. However, apparently the gods had a grudge against Brutal As Hell when it came to this year’s Bram Stoker International Film Festival, as thanks to a combination of work and health issues, one half of the intended reviewing team couldn’t make it at all and the other one, your humble reporter here, was not in the finest of fettle. However, with that caveat, here’s what I saw of the fifth annual BSIFF, Whitby’s fast-becoming-legendary crossover celebration of horror-centric cinema, music, art, and culture…
Last year’s event was a busy and varied affair, and this year’s, under the auspices of recently appointed festival president Sultan Saeed Al Darmaki, was even more so. The screening schedule has been effectively doubled, with the usual horror bill in the Whitby Pavilion’s cinema now complemented by “Sultan’s Sci-Fi Suite”, an upstairs room that had been rigged with a projector to show a selection of the best (and worst) in classic B-movies. Each of the four nights of the festival featured some form of supplementary entertainment, from John Burns’ play “Aleister Crowley” on the Thursday to the renowned Vampires Ball on Saturday, and the downstairs floor of the Pavilion had been fitted out as a gallery showcasing dark, gothic and macabre art, much of it by local artists from Whitby and the surrounding villages. All of this added to BSIFF’s wonderfully immersive, escapist quality. I’ve always loved the sense of suspension of disbelief that surrounds the whole festival. It’s easy to imagine that if Count Dracula himself strolled across from the Abbey and turned up as a special guest here one year, nobody would even be surprised, let alone question his bona fides.
It’s a shame, then, that there seemed to be a shortage of really great new films to fill up the running order. The BSIFF programme is always a mix of the classic and the cutting-edge, with premieres and brand-new releases sitting side by side with the legends of previous generations of horror; but this year, the new contributions really didn’t seem to hold up by comparison with their elders. I admit I didn’t see everything and I heard good things about some of the new films I missed – but I don’t recall hearing anyone raving about how anything had truly blown them away. Which seems a shame.
THURSDAY, 24 October
Of the films I did see, though, I was lucky enough to start on the right foot on Thursday morning with Carlos Jimenez Flores’ Motel 666, a pastiche of those American ghost hunting shows where a group of investigators wander around empty buildings in the dark, shouting at the walls and frightening each other witless. In this case, the empty building is a notoriously haunted motel and the ghost hunters predictably get more than they bargained for. Motel 666 is unambitious in the best way, a film that accepts its limitations with good grace and works effectively inside them, and it manages to conjure up some suitably nasty moments of genuine unpleasantness without losing its sense of humanity. It’s not really in-your-face enough to make it onto anyone’s top ten anything list, but this is a quietly capable little piece and I’d recommend it if you get the chance to see it. Joining it on a double bill was Billy Pon’s Doll Boy, a crude, surreal, grotesque but ultimately nonsensical slasher short that feels like an outtake from a feature film that probably wasn’t very good to start with. I had more fun with the Tarantino/Rodriguez style faux trailers that accompanied this, than with the film itself.
I was hoping for much better from Lou Simon’s Hazmat, which is another take-off on American TV shows: this time, the ones that deal in setting up some poor schmuck for a terrifying prank, candid camera style. When Jacob’s so-called friends call in the hosts of TV show Scary Antics to pull a prank on him, in the setting of the derelict chemical factory where his father was killed in an accident years before and which Jacob is convinced is haunted, everything is clearly going to go wrong, and duly does. Unfortunately, this film is a positive gazetteer of missed opportunities. The potential for a gripping story about purely human good and evil is thrown away by the introduction of a supernatural sideplot so half-arsed that the director had to confirm in the Q&A afterwards that it was even there at all. Conversely, the chance for some high-powered supernatural terror is wasted on scene after scene of the main cast locked in a secure room bickering while the monster is effectively free to put its feet up and have a fag break outside. Hazmat is a case study in that infuriating horror trope of the useless protagonist: these guys don’t do anything, they don’t know what to do to in the first place, and every time one of them attempts to be remotely proactive the others immediately try to stop them. This actually frustrated me so much that I brought it up with director Simon in the Q&A, asking for her thoughts on why so much modern horror seems to rely on making its protagonists so deficient in imagination, aggression or will to survive. Her response? That it’s “just meant to be fun” and you have to overlook this because if you had heroes who actually went after the monster and killed it, it’d be a pretty short movie.
Really? I think Nancy Thompson, Kirsty Cotton and Ellen Ripley, to name but three, would have a few words to say about that. No horror movie should ever have to consciously protect its antagonist. If your monster can’t look after itself in a combat, whether of brain or brawn, against your cast, that means you haven’t created a good enough monster, and asking the audience to overlook a failing like that because it’s “just a bit of fun” is a straight-up copout. There’s no fun to be had at all in sitting through an hour and a half of nonstop internal “but why…?” and I’d recommend you avoid Hazmat like the plague.
Somewhat more inspiring was Derek Hockenbrough’s The Impaler. Every time I think there’s nothing else you can possibly do with the legend of Dracula someone comes up with yet another scenario, and this is one such: seven (apparently eye-poppingly wealthy) American high-school friends rent out Dracula’s castle in Romania for their post-graduation, pre-college vacation party, and, predictably, find themselves in a world of trouble. Not as obviously as you might think, though, as The Impaler does attempt some psychological ambiguity, rather than just making a straight-up everyone-dies monster flick. The central cast balance on a thin line between ruthlessly well-observed and stereotyped – in twenty years from now, this will be a film that will make anyone who lived through the 2010s wince with recognition – and this pin-sharp sense of zeitgeist meshes strangely and yet somehow successfully with a much more timeless sense of Transylvanian grandeur that owes more to Hammer Horror with a touch of Francis Ford Coppola’s Dracula. The results set up a profound sense of dissonance that resonates throughout the film and is an uncomfortable reminder of just how helpless and useless many of us affluent modern Westerners would be if you took away our technological support base; not to mention how mentally ill-equipped we are to confront real danger. While the surface plot of this film is entertaining enough, in some ways the single greatest horror it shows us is exactly how shallow and messed-up our priorities as human beings are becoming.
But if Thursday for me was in large part an exercise in so-so cinema, all was forgiven for the sake of the final film: a rare screening of John Badham’s 1979 Dracula, starring Frank Langella in the title role. Now, everyone has “their” Dracula – Bela Lugosi, Christopher Lee, Gary Oldman et al all have their deserved supporters – but mine? Mine is Frank Langella. I’ve never seen anyone give a more imaginative, nuanced, or enchanting interpretation of Stoker’s Count than he delivers here, by turns sophisticated, seductive, sympathetic and thrillingly terrifying. As charmed as he is charming, dead and yet more alive than anyone else in the room, Langella’s Dracula is an absolute triumph; and that’s before you even factor in the likes of Laurence Olivier’s superbly characterised Van Helsing and Kate Nelligan’s glorious, fearless Lucy. While some significant changes have been made from the plot of the novel (this version was adapted via the script of the play), there’s little to fault in the alterations from a storytelling perspective, and indeed, the fact that this version is set entirely in Whitby makes it all the more apt for a screening at this particular festival. There’s also a special joy for an English viewer in the predominance of UK regional accents, which add a lovely localising touch that more widely renowned versions often lack. The single comment I’ve heard most often after this movie is “That was so much better than I was expecting it to be!” If you haven’t seen it, I recommend you do.
FRIDAY, 25 October
The first film I made it to this morning was the Hammer Horror Brides of Dracula, which I hadn’t previously seen but enjoyed hugely. While I’m far too young to have been a Hammer fan at the time when their most famous movies were being released, this means that instead I grew up in a world where horror was already defined by Hammer’s visions. Every time I watch a Hammer Horror I’m reminded that this is the rock on which my own mental frames of reference for vampires, werewolves, and so on are unthinkingly built, and as such there’s always a delightful sense of familiarity about them even when they’re new to me. Brides of Dracula is a lavish spectacle that romps along at a fine old pace, even if there’s no actual Dracula in it as Christopher Lee refused to appear in this one – then again, “Brides of Baron Meinster” probably wouldn’t have sold as many tickets, so I understand why the title stayed unchanged regardless. And at the very least, it provided some excellent comfort viewing to fortify me for the rest of the day.
This was probably just as well, since by the end of the following offering, Richard Pawelko’s Vampire Guitar, I felt like someone had run my brain through a blender. Let me begin by praising this film: its construction and framing device are genius. Stuck with a budget that wouldn’t run to all the sets and costumes he wanted for his dramatic rock’n’roll tale of a cursed, blood-drinking musical instrument, Pawelko came up with the idea of presenting the story as a radio drama: so we get footage of the actors around a studio microphone delivering their lines in their everyday clothes, intercut with cleverly selected stock footage and symbolic representations of the action that’s going on in the story. It’s a genuinely original response to the financial pressure that indie horror directors invariably face. Unfortunately, the downside is that Vampire Guitar is, therefore, scripted like a vintage BBC radio comedy, but runs to the length of a regular film. It’s like watching someone actually rise to that old Goon Show challenge of “I’d like to see them do that on the television!” and while in principle it does work, this film would have benefited immeasurably from being cut down to a more classic BBC length; the story, and the gags, are too slight to stretch as far as they’re made to here. I’d love to see this framing technique receive more use in future, but perhaps with a lighter touch and a less ambitious narrative.
Next up, however, was a film that clearly had a certain special-guest status at the festival, its makers having been in league with BSIFF for a while and it having been personally backed by festival president Sultan. No horror fan who follows the online gossip can have failed to pick up on the rising swell of publicity for the mysterious Lord of Tears, the “Owlman movie”. There’s been quite a to-whoo (sorry) about this film for months, and consequently there was an eager crowd awaiting its world premiere here on the friendliest turf that director Lawrie Brewster could have hoped for.
Now, last year, a similar level of anticipation greeted Steve Stone’s extraordinary Entity… which promptly suffered a major technical fault in mid-screening. And apparently lightning does strike twice in the same place, as an almost identical hitch befell Lord of Tears, which was stopped about fifteen minutes in and restarted from the beginning. This didn’t really do it any favours. It’s a challenging film to assess anyway on the basis of a single viewing, being a slow, weighty, gothic piece with a dreamlike atmosphere that erases the boundaries of normality and possibility with a sweeping hand to leave both the cast and the viewer faltering in some strange liminal zone that might equally well be a product of magic or madness. It’s got arthouse pretentions, vintage style, and a watercolour aesthetic quality that all conspire to leave the viewer strangely dazed. The bleak Scottish countryside of the setting is shot with an intimacy that brings you right into the heart of it – I could almost feel the wind and rain, the all-permeating grey cold – but the film itself feels very self-contained, a little private nightmare that you’re watching from outside some inviolable narrative bubble. I’m not wholly sure whether I liked it or not; it’s a film that I can imagine being some people’s favourite thing ever, while others would readily get frustrated with it for its leftfield strangeness and far-fetched reveals and denouements. Above all it comes across as a film that’s prepared to stand or fall on its own terms, as though the artistic vision behind it refuses outright to compromise with accessibility or market appeal, and I do respect that. Definitely see it for yourself, because I really wouldn’t like to try and predict whether any one person would love it or hate it. (Editor’s note: see also Keri’s review of Lord of Tears.)
At this point I took a break, and when I made it out again it wasn’t to watch films, but for the live music at the evening Children of the Night event in the Pavilion’s main hall. To my regret I missed the two support bands, electro-industrialists Global Citizen and gothic synthrockers Vampyre Heart; but my real goal for the night was always to catch legendary English pagan rock stars Inkubus Sukkubus, whom I’d loved for years but never had chance to see live before. To my delight, they turned in a fantastic performance, loaded with energy, charisma and memorable songs spanning the entirety of their twenty-year-plus career. While the BSIFF setting doesn’t really make for a full-on rock concert atmosphere as the table seating in the main hall rather discourages people from getting up and dancing, it was a pleasure to be able to get to the front row without having to push for elbow room. The event’s air of glamour, enhanced by such touches as the giant crystal chandelier that hung above the dancefloor, was a definite treat, and the overall effect was both distinctive and enjoyable. Indeed, I ended up hanging around rather longer than I meant to after Inkubus Sukkubus’s set and missing Thanatomorphose, so I must have been having a fair amount of fun…
Read Part 2 of Kit’s BSIFF report here.