By Ben Bussey
So here I pick up where Tristan left off – more or less. See, while I did indeed arrive on Friday 9th November for my second year at Abertoir, I didn’t get there until mid-afternoon. Simple truth about Aberystwyth – it doesn’t matter where you’re coming from, it always takes a long time to get there. Makes it a great setting for a horror festival, as the journey there invariably feels like the set-up to a horror movie. I’ve never been there by car, but I’m sure it would involve a great many wrong turns and questions of “are you sure we’re going the right way?” And even going by train, you’ll always meet some creepy guy when you change at Shrewsbury, who says “you don’t want to go down to Aberystwyth – it’s got a death curse!”
Well, okay, that’s never actually happened, but I don’t think it’s outside the realms of possibility.
Anyway, had I arrived first thing I’d have been there for The Battery. Happily, I’d already caught it at Celluloid Screams in Sheffield a few weeks back – and yes, I am indeed happy to have seen it, even though I don’t necessarily foresee myself having any great desire to see it again. This unorthodox, microbudget take on the zombie movie seems to have met a bit of a muted reaction from the Abertoir audience, largely down to its uneventful nature and emphasis on often painfully long takes. I suppose its appeal hinges on whether or not you can care for the characters; I certainly could, though I understand many viewers did not feel likewise. As an attempt to do something a bit different in an overcrowded subgenre, I’d say The Battery is certainly a success, but it skirts a fine line between crafting a tense, realistic atmosphere and simply boring its audience. (See Keri’s review from Dead By Dawn.)
The day’s next event which I was too late to catch was a talk by our esteemed sometime contributor Gavin Baddeley. He’s a clever sod who could talk the hind legs off a donkey, so I’ve no doubt it was all very erudite and witty.
But no – my introduction to Abertoir 2013 was The Strange Colour of Your Body’s Tears. Out of the frying pan, into the flames of Hades…
Okay, okay, I can keep this rational. Did you see Amer, the last film from directorial duo Helene Cattet and Bruno Forzani? If so, did you enjoy it? If the answer to both questions is yes, you may well be quite happy with Strange Colour. Indeed, it starts out looking like it’s going to be a great deal more accessible than its wilfully obtuse predecessor, though every bit as reliant on lush, arty, Giallo-inspired visuals. But the more it goes on the more lush and arty the visuals get, and the less tangible the story becomes.
Here’s the thing… I fell asleep for I think about ten or fifteen minutes midway. (Don’t judge me too harshly, it’s an unwritten rule of festival attendance that everyone nods off at least once or twice, typically during a film they’re not enjoying.) However, I get the distinct impression that, had I been awake the whole time, it wouldn’t have done much to change my perception of the overall movie. Now, I could give some vague stabs in the dark as to what it was all about (men living in mortal terror of gorgeous women on their period, as far as I can tell), but it very quickly reached the point of being past giving a shit. I don’t object to a bit of weirdness, nor do I demand that all films make perfect sense – I gave Motivational Growth a largely positive write-up, after all – but The Strange Colour of Your Bleeding Vagina just wasn’t my cup of herbal tea at all.
Happily, next up was The Machine, which was much more to my liking; here’s my review if you missed it.
Last of the night for me was Bad Milo. What can I say – cryptic French Giallo homages may not be my bag, but what’s not to love about an all-American comedy about a guy with a little monster up the Gary Glitter? Tristan already gave this a great write-up, and I don’t really have a great deal to add to his assessment; this is a funny, and surprisingly heart-warming piece of work which I strongly suspect will garner a healthy cult following.
With the onset of fatigue (to paraphrase the late great Jim Kelly – it was a big day, I was a little tired), I skipped out on the midnight Mystery Grindhouse, an Abertoir tradition which I’d enjoyed in 2012. Still, I was back relatively rested next morning – well, okay, early afternoon, but I tend to find Abertoir attendees greet one another with “good morning” until about 3 o’clock – in time to catch some of the short films showcase. I can’t pretend any of them made that great an impression. Swiss short Beware of Children was a lighter-hearted variation on Children of the Corn/Who Can Kill A Child which was initially amusing but lacking any real tension, and at 15 minutes a little overlong for a short. Similarly, French production Silence took a set-up worthy of a modern US-style slasher (naughty college kids stay overnight in a library for a dare, only to meet the ghoulish librarians who come out at night), but isn’t able to explore the idea to its full potential. Tricky things, shorts: if they try to tell too big a story, they fall apart somewhat.
Saturday’s first feature was The Borderlands, which – as I’ve already said in my review – is the first horror movie for some time to really, genuinely creep me the fuck out. And I heartily applaud it for that.
Next up came Forgotten (Du hast es versprochen), a German chiller which twists and turns like a twisty-turny thing. The story follows young, well-to-do wife and mother Hanna (the really, really unbelievably good looking Mina Tander) as, following a spat with her husband, she is unexpectedly reunited with a long-lost childhood friend (the really, really unbelievably good looking Laura de Boer), with whom she promptly absconds with daughter in tow to a quiet little island where she and her friend used to take their holidays. However, as they reach the island, Hanna slowly starts remembering what happened there in their younger days, and it ain’t all good… nor is it all that straightforward. The convoluted plot may boast a few too many big surprise revelations for its own good, but at least it’s never predictable – and, as I might have mentioned, it certainly doesn’t hurt that the female leads are really, really unbelievably good looking. (No lesbian scenes, though, dagnammit.) But despair not, man-fanciers: we also have a very pretty boy in the mix in the form of a bearded Max Riemelt, who previously appeared clean-shaven in We Are The Night.
And then came the classic horror double bill which I can safely say was the absolute highlight of the whole festival for me, and I suspect many other Abertoir attendees would say the same…
First up – Zombie Flesh Eaters (or, as some of you bloody foreigners know it, Zombie/Zombi 2). This movie was my first Lucio Fulci experience way back when (in the ol’ days when the BBFC approved version cut away before the splinter pierces the eyeball), and I must confess that at the time I couldn’t really see what all the fuss was about. Fulci in general just washed over me a bit in my younger days: silly, derivative stories filled with bad acting and worse dubbing, punctuated with extended sequences of ridiculous splatter in unflinching close-ups. But the thing was, my first experiences of these films were typically home alone. To hell with that. Fulci is an Abertoir staple; this is the second of his movies I’ve seen at the festival (after The Beyond last year, with Catriona Maccoll in attendance), and these viewings have really hammered home that they really do work best as a communal experience. When we’re all laughing aloud at the bad dubbing, murmurring “uh-oh” when the gory bits draw near and saying “ew” when they finally hit, or – in this instance – sniggering like schoolkids every time anyone says “Matool,” it really does bring the strange magic of these movies to the surface.
It also doesn’t hurt when two of the key players of the movie are there to discuss it afterwards. One of the really heartwarming things about this event was that Richard Johnson and Fabio Frizzi were both booked seperately as Abertoir guests, and were originally intended to appear on different evenings, until a fairly last-minute rescheduling meant they were both there on the same evening – making it the very first meeting of the Zombie Flesh Eaters composer and the actor who played Dr Menard. Not that you’d think it to see the two men sat together, both looking thoroughly pleased to be in one another’s company. It was wonderful to hear both men recount their careers, obviously with particular emphasis on their time with Fulci. Johnson absolutely brought the house down with an anecdote on the difficulties Fulci had trying to get a decent performance out of the naked scuba diver Auretta Gay (Johnson’s clearly not from the Peter Cushing school of only saying nice things about your co-stars); recounting Fulci’s intense frustration, the 86-year old actor leapt to his feet and impersonated the director falling to his knees in a rage and eating the grass. Nor was that the only massive round of applause Johnson earned that evening, as he later proclaimed how immensely proud he was when Zombie Flesh Eaters was banned in the UK.
And then, the second Richard Johnson movie of the evening – The Haunting. This is one of those movies which, on first viewing many years back, was a real watershed moment for me. I first saw it in student halls, on a poxy little 14 inch black and white portable TV running off a twiddly set-top aerial – but even on so small and crappy a screen, the sheer visual power of Robert Wise’s film was just overwhelming. And, as you can imagine, it plays even better on the big screen. I was a little surprised to see how it didn’t seem to go down all that well with the whole Abertoir audience – I gather quite a few people found Julie Harris’ performance as the troubled Eleanor to be annoying. Still, to me this remains one of the very best films ever made in the genre, and the cornerstone by which all great ghost movies are measured.
The night came to a close outside of the cinema with a live set from White Blacula, a new (and rather loud) band featuring members of Zombina and the Skeletones, and a Fabio Frizzi-heavy DJ set from Bronnt Industries Kapital. I’ll be honest though – by this point I was too preoccupied getting reaquainted with rarely seen friends (not to mention my old chum, cider) to give an especially measured critical response. Though there was the matter of a large, remote-controlled inflatable shark floating around the bar, inviting any would-be zombies to come and have a go…
Sunday morning, then, found me perhaps a little worse for wear, to the extent that I missed almost all the second half of the short films showcase, and those I did see I was in danger of dozing through. Happily, I was more with it for the day’s first feature, Motivational Growth, which prompted much thoughtful beard stroking – and, of course, this review.
Next up was a short films showcase of a somewhat different kind: four macabre silent shorts from the earliest days of cinema, with live piano accompaniment and specially composed music from Paul Shallcross, for whom Abertoir is an annual gig (last year he provided similar musical accompaniment to the Lon Chaney movie The Unknown). As well as tinkling the ivories, Shallcross also gives us some very informative and entertaining introductions, pointing out little mistakes for us to look out for – e.g. that the ‘chariot’ which takes the characters to hell in Segundo de Chomon’s short La Legende du Fantome is in quite clearly a car with an awkwardly placed bedsheet over the top. (Nor was that the only thing to get a laugh, as there was much sniggering – from the BaH writers in attendance, at least – at the captions referring to Hell as ‘the lower regions.’)
Also screened were another Segundo de Chomon short Le Spectre Rouge, which felt more like a diabolic spin on a stage magic show; an early British shocker entitled The Jest, which has the feel of a proto-EC Comics yarn with its darkly comic twist ending; and, perhaps most intriguingly, the very first screen adaptation of Frankenstein from J. Searle Dawley, a narratively-truncated but visually interesting take on the tale that’s a million miles away from what James Whale would do with it just over 20 years later. It also boasts a really striking scene of the monster’s creation that’s unlike anything seen in any subsequent Frankenstein movie – but hugely reminscent of Frank’s regeneration scene in Hellraiser.
Next up was Chimères, which I skipped as I’d already seen it at Celluloid Screams, where it didn’t exactly win me over (see my review). One pepperoni pizza and a couple of Cokes later, I rejoined the Abertoir audience as we were temporarily relocated from the cinema screen to the Aberystwyth Arts Centre theatre for a one-man stage show, The Ghost Hunter, from the Theatre of the Damned company. It’s an interesting extended monologue, recounting the experiences of a seasoned ghost tour operator, providing a witty, sympathetic and often fairly sad look into the lives of those in that rarefied profession, and how the lines between reality and fiction can easily become muddied. Actor Tom Richards did fine work commanding the stage, though most discussion afterwards tended to focus on the impressiveness of his moustache.
The day, and the festival, came to a close with Soulmate, the debut feature from writer-director Axelle Carolyn – which proved a rather bittersweet note to go out on. I wanted to enjoy it, I really did. I’ve long had a lot of respect for Axelle Carolyn, given how well she has been able to move between different roles within the horror industry, and I had high hopes this would really launch her – but honestly, Soulmate made it clear that she still has a long way to go. It’s in a fairly similar vein to her 2011 short The Last Post, a sombre tale about loss and regret with a ghostly element. When I interviewed her at the time, Carolyn mentioned her desire to “fight that preconceived notion that horror’s sole purpose was to scare an audience… you can use the genre to express all kinds of emotions.” I completely agree, and I can see that’s very much what she was aiming for with Soulmate, as it centres on a recently bereaved widow who, following a suicide attempt, moves into a remote country cottage in search of solitude, but instead finds herself in the company of a ghost. The premise isn’t necessarily anything that new, but Carolyn’s approach is, as rather than a stereotypical tale of terror, this is a story of two lost souls bonding – only one of them happens to be dead.
Yes, it’s a nice idea, and it’s very nicely realised on an aesthetic level, the very good cinematography making use of some very attractive Welsh scenery, as well as the far-from unattractive actors Anna Walton and Tom Wisdom as the widow and ghost. Sadly, on pretty much every other level Soulmate falls flat. Carolyn’s script just isn’t up to scratch, with thin characterisations, feeble dialogue, and plot developments that often feel contrived in the extreme, particularly once we reach the more conventional horror movie finale. There’s also no denying a certain goofiness in the scenes when Wisdom’s ghost finally sits down for a chat with Walton; this probably wouldn’t have been a problem if a smidgen more humour had been put into the mix. Alas, Soulmate takes itself way too seriously, and winds up looking a wee bit silly for it.
Still, whilst the closing film may have been a slight disappointment, it was by no means a disappointing weekend. I doff my cap to the Abertoir team, and look forward to joining them again in 2014, same time, same place.
Moving from the intellectual to the frankly daft, the first film of the day was the eighties classic The Monster Squad, the heartwarming tale of a gang of horror-loving kids who find themselves facing off against a team of old Universal-style monsters – Dracula, Frankenstein’s monster, the Wolfman, the Mummy, and the Gillman – set on taking over the world in the name of Evil. I’d never seen this before but had had it highly recommended to me by “Necro” Neil of Necronomicon fanzine, and it was everything I’d expected: silly, funny, charming, entertaining and with some wonderful heartstring-tugging moments. A feelgood classic for any horror fan with a surviving inner child, especially perhaps the older ones among us.
In an amusing segue, Roddy Piper featured in the next film as well, but here the context was very different. Cody Knotts’ Pro Wrestlers vs. Zombies is a film that I’m honestly amazed it took this long for someone to make. After all, the traditional zombie movie requires a reasonably sized group of people in an isolated setting, a horde of undead extras, and as many high-tension fights, chases and crisis situations as you can cram into the plot. To make the living faction pro wrestlers – who have a plausible reason to all be together in a random large building, and already possess the necessary instincts to hit someone with a chair first and ask questions later – seems, if you’ll pardon the phrase, a no-brainer.
I, however, wasn’t to be seen again until Sunday morning when I arrived for a screening of Peter Newbrook’s The Asphyx, which is terribly British, terribly seventies, and… well, mostly just terrible, to be honest. Following the tragic deaths of his second wife and grownup son in a boating accident, scientist, psychical researcher and photography buff Sir Hugo Cunningham becomes obsessed with the desire to identify the mysterious entities that can be seen on photographic images of the dying; these turn out to be the so-called “asphyxes”, psychopomps of sorts that unite with a dying person’s spiritual essence and apparently consume it. He then starts trying to trap asphyxes with the help of his adopted son Giles, and descends rapidly into a deranged quest for immortality whose exact motivation is never wholly clear. By halfway into this movie the entire theatre was snickering, as the characterisation and scripting grew too absurd for anyone to endure with a straight face; outrageously hammy, far-fetched and implausible, and generally reminiscent of the worst excesses of the Frankenstein cinematic heritage. I was half expecting a hunchback named Igor to wander into the plot with no explanation required. One element of this film that I did like was the asphyxes themselves, hideous half-formed creatures that can only be seen and trapped by a specific type and frequency of light – despite the limitations of early seventies special effects, these writhing, screaming little horrors are authentically unsettling enough to stick around in your nightmares for a while afterwards. Mind you, so will the rest of this film, but very much for the wrong reasons.
Which, predictably enough, I really, really enjoyed. The effects may be old and the sets and atmosphere of the film partake strongly of the classic BBC sci-fi tradition, but like They Live, Quatermass and the Pit has utterly failed to date in its insights into the politics of power, the limits of military authority and competence, and the pros and cons of transparency in public affairs. When mysterious skeletons and a strange metallic artefact are discovered during the extension of a London Tube station, the authorities involved make all the same mistakes that we’d expect to see now, and the infighting, politicking and self-interest at play are depressingly familiar. But since this is a classic film and not a modern one, we’re given a ray of hope in the form of the redoubtable Professor Quatermass, who strides through the chaos taking a determined if extremely Old British stand for science, reason and the best interests of mankind; one of those courageous, intelligent, capable altruists that the cinematic world seems to be very short on these days. While it’s a relatively low-key film by modern standards (despite the ending having been revised by Hammer from the BBC original to add bigger explosions), Quatermass and the Pit remains a classic of eerie, intelligent horror SF that can still leave a viewer wondering: what if? What if we found something like this? What if the history of the world really does contain something this anomalous, this utterly bizarre? What would it mean, and how would we deal with it? And that’s what SF at its best should always do: make us question what we know, and contemplate what we’re going to do with the things we’re going to know in future. Quatermass and the Pit achieves that and much more. Still a classic.
By the time I returned to the Pavilion the main room was playing host to the 1880s Night event, with live bands and a wide range of performers and entertainers, but I elected instead to go and catch the final couple of films. First up was The Pyramid, an experimental Italian project consisting of four short narratives that link to form a single whole centring on a mysterious artefact: a small decorated pyramid that seems to act as a vector for unimaginable chaos and horror. Each short has a different director, though it’s obvious that all four were shot in very close cohesion with each other as the story continues seamlessly through the transitions between them.
Having sat through that, it was a relief to be able to unwind with the final movie of the festival, Hammer’s Vampire Circus. When a plague-stricken village is visited by a circus, at first the villagers are grateful for the distraction from their woeful state, but it slowly becomes clear that the circus is here for more sinister reasons by far than simply to fleece them of their remaining silver. This is a real extravaganza of escapism in the finest Hammer tradition, complete with stereotyped exotic gypsies and carnival atmosphere, a setting that owes less to history or geography than it does to some sort of collective unconscious of horror cinema, and an erotic charge that’s quite subdued by modern standards but still manages to convey a reminiscence of the frisson it would have induced in a more tight-laced era. While it’s very much of the time and falls rather short of modern ethical and ideological standards in places, this is a great film to simply relax and enjoy the visual spectacle of, and an excellent choice of feelgood sendoff for the festival.
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.
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.
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.
By Stephanie Scaife
