It feels like a while since we had a really good, honest-to-goodness zombie flick. For a while there, there were enough of them that we could debate whether zombies should be able run or not; with a few exceptions, though, the genre has stalled since the ferocious Train to Busan a decade ago (despite the subsequent appearance of sequel Peninsula), so given that Colony (2026) is another South Korean foray into the genre by the very same director, hopes were high – maybe a little too high. The resulting film is entertaining enough, though its convoluted reason for the outbreak cycles through derivative and overcomplex, and it’s just too long, with a tendency to rehash the same scenes over and over. Does it do as promised? Yes, admittedly it does, but with a few unnecessary pitfalls along the way which impact on its overall sense of direction and impetus.
We start with a very clear statement of intent: Seo Yeong Cheol (Koo Kyo-hwan) calling the police to tell them he is a bio-terrorist, about to launch an attack on the Doongwoori Building – a mall and conference centre. He then injects himself with an appropriately bright green substance – the antidote – and heads off to watch a speech being given by CEO of Chains Bio, Kang Woo-chul (Kim Jong-tae). Chains Bio has just launched a new – and I’m trying to get the science straight here – bio-chip which will enable humans to better communicate with one another by…connecting people’s brains together (why the hell anyone would want that is beyond me) via some kind of fungal mould? Uh, oh, by the way. But the specific whys and wherefores don’t really matter, thankfully. The point is that we acknowledge this ability is about to be manipulated by perennially-smirking former employee Seo, whom it seems has more than one grievance to keep him going across the course of the film, and when he confronts CEO Kang in his private rooms, he injects him with another Bad Science syringe full of what immediately turns Kang into a vomiting, mindless zombie, who then goes off to make more zombies.
These zombies not only run, but they start off leaping about on all fours, and the infection spreads very fast – there are some nicely physical, choreographed sequences – resulting in the Doongwoori Building being quarantined: the police did have a bit of a warning that this was going to happen, of course. Unlucky for her, Professor Se Jeong (Jun Ji-hyun) is in the building too, after receiving an invitation to watch the CEO’s keynote speech; thinking she is about to be headhunted for a new job, she’s instead very clearly thrown into the Final Girl role, bringing her own scientific expertise to bear on the situation so that she and a peculiar little gang can get to safety.
When it all gets going – which is not very long at all into the runtime, to give it credit – Colony clearly knows that audiences want to see something of an onslaught, and it sort of delivers. One thing which is strange to note, despite the zombies looking every inch the walking dead, all smeared with blood and a weird mucus-y substance, is that the film intimates, rather than outright shows, its violence. It’s strange. It has a 15 certificate here in the UK, which will doubtless open it up to a wider audience, but you never really see the bites and there’s nothing here to much trouble Tom Savini or Howard Berger at night. It can feel a little coy, due to this tacit approach to people biting big holes in other people, as the rather large crowd of survivors gets picked off by zombies which, under the mind control of smirking man, ‘evolve’ through a number of stages until Seo can essentially control them, like an army, sending them hither and yon as the mood takes him. Understanding that he is a living antidote, the survivors are keen to catch up with him, but he eludes them regularly and tries to get them killed.
Meanwhile outside, the police and the army try to mount a rescue (of Seo) as scientists try to understand what exactly Seo has done, and how (leading to arguably the film’s greatest scene, taking place in an impromptu lab which Mr Grievance has set up out in the sticks). There are great bits, but Colony is unnecessarily derivative (a pinch of 28 Days Later, a healthy dollop of The Last of Us), and then overcomplicated; these are familiar ideas, rejigged to the point of pointless complexity. There are also leaps of faith which I didn’t really understand, introduced and then abandoned. How would you ‘just know’ that a dab of antifreeze behind the ears would make one ‘invisible’ to the zombies? Then sending someone on a perfume run? Odd, as is abandoning the idea just when it seems like it works.
Perhaps Yeon Sang-Ho feels he has ‘done’ zombie horror in its most straightforward, grisly form already and fancied doing it a different way, but equally, it’s clear that he loves the genre enough to keep returning to it every few years: Colony has some good scenes, some great scenes and moments of high action which rank alongside Yeon’s best work, but taken as a whole, it just isn’t as compelling as his earlier films, as it doesn’t commit to either the human storytelling or the expected ultraviolence. The wait for an all-out zombie flick goes on, I fear.
Wasting no time in getting its players on the board and establishing its own sardonic spin on Americana, Valley View Motel (2026) is a love letter to the 70s crime genre cinema with which it shares its setting. We start with what looks like a robbery gone very wrong – there are dead bodies and there’s a constantly wailing alarm – before we’re shifted away from this cold open to far more affluent and (apparently) easeful surroundings. In a mountain cabin, an elderly man receives some unpalatable news, no doubt about the heist, and his command is simple: “Call Hal.”
It’s always good to have someone you can rely on, but who’s Hal? It seems he’s a high school maths teacher with a grim sideline in murdering blokes tied to chairs (remember when every new horror had one of those?) Then there’s a pair of diamond thieves, Reg (Soulo Smith) and Cliff (co-director/co-writer Kevin Ignatius), who have found a moment to discuss the distinct pros and cons of their line of work. It seems to be the case that habitual thieves never have enough money, and as such, Reg is keen on one more call, one more job – something which could affect both of them, potentially in catastrophic ways. Oh, and then we have a mother (Judy J. Lee) and daughter Sunny (Laura Im) off to start a new life in a new state – though rather unwillingly, after the gambling-addicted Mr. Kang sold out their life’s savings from under them before, shall we say, making his own way out.
In turbulent times such as these, the two men decide it’s necessary to go to ground, so they do the tried-and-tested thing: finding a remote motel room for the night. Now the film is named for the motel; that tells you, without a review to establish the fact, that this place will come to figure very importantly in what unfolds next, and accordingly, proceedings get weirder and more menacing from here on in, as our respective players congregate at the Valley View.
There’s a lot to like and admire here. The 70s aesthetic developed here is strong and consistent, wisely dodging things which might give the game away, whilst a lot of the shots used are nicely reminiscent of 70s-era crime dramas and, to an extent, crime comics (which developed in tandem with genre cinema). The broad array of views/shots are confident, and they do come together well to build a sense of a world at large here, even when much of the film takes place in more confined spaces. As for who we follow, the characters in Valley View Motel are right on the cusp of overblown and plausible, which works perfectly well with the style and themes in play here. Taken as a whole, the film itself feels like an agreeable blend of the likes of the Coen Brothers and – yeah, let’s just address it – early Tarantino, or if that’s a bridge too far for some readers, certainly the cinema which influenced Tarantino himself.
But the film is also able to bring in elements of other genres, most notably horror; it’s getting its premiere at a horror film festival, after all. It does need to import some horror tropes to do it and, arguably, this part of the film isn’t as secure as the rest (feeling much more incidental than integral), but it certainly shows that the film can accommodate different styles and developments. This isn’t a high octane crime flick – it’s not full of car chases, it doesn’t have a vast cast and nor does it dig into the wider world of police procedural or gangland drama, but its close focus on a small number of characters, sticking with something closer to vignette in places, still allows for emotional investment to take place, and the film’s more oblique approach to violence – it’s not all men tied to chairs – doesn’t strip away the film’s more disquieting moments.
The glue that holds it all together is the interesting – if necessarily remote – villain of the piece, Hal (co-director/co-writer Nick Psinakis), and he does great work bringing all of the film’s discrete chapters together, as well as driving the film towards its final act. There are occasions – more often that we might like – when a director/writer appearing in their own film feels like a mistake, but that’s not the case here: Ignatius and Psinakis are great on screen, and their performances are genuinely solid.
If there’s maybe one beat too many before the film’s close, then nonetheless, Valley View Motel showcases a real love of genre film throughout. It almost sneaks in its commentary on cycles of violence and the ramifications of momentary decisions, too, so you only really realise that’s what happened right at the end credits (but without feeling you’ve been hit over the head with The Message). I don’t know that this is a true story, sort of or otherwise, but it’s a really good film, and what it achieves on its no-doubt tight budget is impressive.
Valley View Motel (2026) received its FrightFest World Premiere on Monday, August 31st.
2012: Jerry’s, somewhere in the boonies, is the self-proclaimed ‘best bar in town’, with a thriving karaoke night taking place – right up until a drunk stumbles over and yanks out the machine’s power cable, blasting the literal eyeballs out of the current performer.
I like it when a film makes a strong declaration of intent, and they don’t come much stronger than this opening scene in Bad Karaoke (2026) with its (okay, CGI) flying eyeballs making things nice and clear. This is to the credit of director and writer Chris Lightbody and his Bad Bong soundtrack pedigree, and ditto co-director Robert J. Steinmiller Jr, who has a similar background: I don’t know exactly how you get from writing Bad Bong soundtrack music to directing a film about karaoke gone awry, but it doesn’t feel like the most outlandish turn of events, and if you know anything at all about the Bad Bong films, then you’ll know the sort of thing to expect here: there’s a cursed object which goes on to terrorise a group of hapless young people. There’s even a very small Venn diagram overlap here with Bad Karaoke‘s stoner-ish (and occasionally outright stoned) key players. But, on with the film at hand.
We next meet our particular hapless young people: this is a covers band, The Nunu (it’s not clear if the slang meaning for this term is intentional, but it’ll certainly be understood at FrightFest), comprising of six members. After a temporary breakdown at the side of the road – where we first meet them – they’re soon on the move to their overnight destination (a cabin in the woods!) before a wedding gig the following day. This leaves them plenty of time for a detour, and wouldn’t you know it, they end up at Jerry’s. Some relationship-building later, we get to the already-anticipated meat of the plot: karaoke. The ill-fated karaoke machine, long since stored away in the bar, is discovered by band member Emily (Lexi Underwood), who is (perhaps a little keenly) permitted to take it with her by the current bartender. So we now have an apparently cursed Song-a-Ling at hand, all nice and ready for when the band gets settled into their accommodation.
There’s a little lull in the pace around here – the film does have some fits and starts along the way – but eventually, inevitably, the machine gets switched on. The deal seems to be this: the machine enlists each individual to sing a song, but their performances get judged by the possessed machine itself, with a grisly demise in store for anyone whose singing doesn’t pass muster…
As suggested above, Bad Karaoke knows exactly what it is and it’s happy for us to be under no illusions either. Fans of daft horror comedy will enjoy this; people who are more indifferent to the genre will likely still feel that the film passes the time amicably. You need to be happy to overlook some of the increasingly blurry and contentious lines between practical FX, green screen and computer-generated content, something which seems to get ever more objectionable as time goes on and new films get made, but we get some good set pieces which should pass muster. If anything, it could have leaned into the splattery gore a lot harder and probably pleased a lot more people. There’s also a breezy script, with performances which are pitched just right for the material, plus some funny skits and inclusions (even at the expense of at least one minor continuity error). The lore here, when it comes, is minimal – but it adds enough context to flesh things out in the film’s final act.
This isn’t a film which really lends itself to an in-depth review: that probably doesn’t need further explanation, but just in case, it’s because this is a relatively straightforward yarn with one daft idea at its core, one which lends itself to a few jokes and a few gory, entertaining scenes. Bad Karaoke is cartoonish and often gleefully obnoxious, but short and snappy enough to do its thing inside eighty minutes. If you look very closely, you might also feel that the film makes a serious point about the importance of cherishing original music, but this isn’t done in any sort of disproportionate, comedy-killing depth and you may even miss it, if you’re more engaged by exploding heads and soupification. It’s no great crime if so, and it works either way.
Bad Karaoke (2026) received its World Premiere at Tubi FrightFest on August 30th.
When I was writing my book on witchcraft in horror cinema, Celluloid Hex, I originally wrote an additional chapter on a fairly-obscure Italian occult horror mash-up, Baba Yaga (1973). It was a lot of fun to research, and yielded a lot of interesting material, but when I was doing layouts for Celluloid Hex it just didn’t fit very well with the general tone and direction of the book, so with a few regrets, I removed it. Still, it’s a shame for all that work to go to waste, so you can find the chapter in its entirety below. If the film sounds good to you, then you could do far, far worse than pick up a copy from Shameless Films (at the time of writing, the DVD is only displaying as being available from Amazon rather than direct from Shameless, but I’d happily amend this if that changes). And of course, if you are tantalised by all this talk of witchcraft in film and would like to know what did make it into the book, please do grab a copy – I still have some print copies left!
Meanwhile, back in Europe…
The story of Baba Yaga (1973) is the story of a rapidly modernising Italy, particularly a Milan which found itself as both an industrial sprawl and a hub of fashion and pop culture by the 1970s. It’s a Milan of opportunities, of a great nightlife, a great arts scene and growing social freedoms – but it is also a fraught place, rife with social divisions and dilemmas. Still, flux brings positive change too, and a comic artist with a distinctive, subversive style was about to encapsulate his ideal of modern Italian womanhood – before pitching her against forces rather difficult to control. This would lead to an unholy meld of comic book and cinema, a story which connects various threads of folklore, magic and art to threaten our heroine – and the city of Milan – with the old menace of witchcraft.
To understand Baba Yaga, first we need to take a journey into a different artform, because it’s this which impacts upon this particular piece of Eurohorror and its own adaptation of Eastern European folklore. Director Corrado Farrina based his film on a certain comic strip…
In Italy, the development of comic book culture, particularly with regards to female characters, took until the post-war years to get off the ground. Financially hammered by World War II, with the after-effects of the war leading to shifts in priorities, ambitions and attitudes, the entertainment industry slowly reanimated towards the end of the 1940s. 1948 saw Italy’s very first female comic character, a Tarzanesque woman called Pantera Bionda (Blonde Panther) who quickly incurred the wrath of the Italian censors for her lack of clothing. Scanty clothing or not, she reflected a Europe- and America-wide movement towards drawing unorthodox women who eschewed many feminine norms. Having minimal clothes on is, after all, eschewing a feminine norm in itself for many prospective audiences.
Comics have regularly challenged this thinking, and in the Sixties, the appearance of the French comic character Barbarella helped to entrench the new concept of comics for adults – even comics with erotic subtexts, very much not intended for children. By now, the social changes which had begun to emerge in the post-war years had developed into a definable movement. Free love blended with science fiction in the character of Barbarella, whose space adventures also tended to be a bit risqué. As Cara Takakjian notes in her essay on a character called Valentina (1), Barbarella’s success meant that these stories soon started appearing in neat single volumes of their own: this helped to legitimise the idea of a new erotic comic genre, spawning a number of other female characters, many of which could claim some kin with Barbarella: archetypal goth chick Vampirella, for example, was an inhabitant of the distant planet Drakulon: she discovers and steals an earth ship when it crashes on her world and she realises humans have the blood she needs. And, in Italy, a fan of the Barbarella artist Jean-Claude Forest began formulating ideas for his own unconventional heroine. Step forward, Guido Crepax, creator of the popular Valentina character and comic.
Crepax had trained as an architect in Milan prior to starting work as a jobbing artist: working on anything from medical illustrations to album covers, he honed his line work, moving in a wholly different direction to the more mainstream likes of Marvel and DC in America. In the 1960s, Crepax turned his attention more specifically to comic book style art and began to contribute to Linus, a magazine dedicated to the form (itself evidence of the surging popularity of comic art by this decade).
Undoubtedly, Guido Crepax is best known for his character Valentina Rosselli – modelled on silent film star Louise Brooks, as well as on Crepax’s wife – a woman who represented the modern push/pull in Italian values which had both permitted but challenged earlier characters such as Pantera Bionda. Although Valentina first appears as girlfriend to a mysterious American with superpowers, from the very beginning Valentina is in many ways shown as a modern, self-sufficient woman: she’s strong and has a mind of her own. She has a successful career as a photographer, she lives independently, and she calls the shots with the men in her life, rejecting them or accepting them as she sees fit. In The Lesmo Curve, one of her very first outings, Valentina is covering an important race which just so happens to be a stitch-up, with the lead driver, Johnson, the target of a fortune-hunting crime syndicate who have tampered with his car. Luckily, Valentina’s lover Mr. Rembrandt uses his powers to keep both Johnson (and by proxy, Valentina) out of harm’s way. A pattern soon emerges: Valentina, an intelligent, liberated girl – in the crowded and rather madcap Milan of the late 60s and early 70s – nonetheless often finds herself disarmed, confused – and disrobed. As she moves out of the shadow of her Mr. Rembrandt, there are more and more opportunities to get into mischief: Valentina began appearing on her own in print in 1968.
For Crepax, Valentina’s position as an enlightened career woman was always of vital importance to her characterisation. He wanted her to belong to the new Italy, a place which afforded women the potential to live their own lives. It’s just that her own predilections often see her daydreaming about being rather literally confined, shall we say. Valentina is frequently whipped, blindfolded, gagged and otherwise stripped of volition, though it’s worth pointing out that this tends to be in the realms of Valentina’s own fantasies. These daydreams are all part of Crepax’s mores, of course, but it’s also worth remembering that Valentina herself has these fantasies. They’re not being imposed on her. They are her. In this respect, she occupies the space between female autonomy and fantasy which would later make her the perfect character to pitch against old magic on-screen. Though, to be fair to Valentina, she gets whipped and tied up by a very wide range of people, anyone from Nazis to astronauts. She has atrocious luck.
Crepax’s visual style is integral to our understanding of Valentina. Keeping this style has been a challenge for adapting Valentina to the screen, but working to retain as much as possible of Crepax in any adaptation has been vital to keep that sense of his most famous creation. Valentina’s perceptions, often communicated via images of her eyes taking in whatever is going on around her, define her as the key figure in any of her narratives. Her perceptions are often prioritised over a neat narrative; often disadvantaged by being charmingly naïve, or otherwise out of the loop, Valentina often strives to maintain her normal routine as all manner of madness unfolds. All of this makes her an ideal character to adapt to film – at least, the kind of film envisioned by Corrado Farina in 1973.
Farina, by no means an exploitation movie devotee, nonetheless created Baba Yaga from the original cartoon of the same title, with Crepax’s blessing. Crepax appears in a brief cameo in the film, as well as getting namechecked by some of Valentina’s friends, keen to show off their pop culture credentials. Perhaps the key difference between Valentina in her comics and on-screen is that, in Baba Yaga, her sadomasochistic fantasies are no longer simply (or mainly) the province of her imagination. This time, she is really fully at the mercy of a sexually voracious older woman. However, no one could disagree that the casting of Isabelle De Funès as Valentina is inspired; the actress looks impressively like Crepax’s artwork – although Farina actually wanted the Italian actress Elsa Martinelli to play Valentina. Her opposing character in Baba Yaga, eventually played by Carroll Baker, was due to be played by former beauty queen Anne Heywood, whose withdrawal from the project was rather abrupt and led to her being successfully sued by the studio for breach of contract. Carroll Baker steps up with some panache, though Farina felt that she looked ‘too American’ for the role as he envisaged it. So, the film contains an actress the director didn’t choose, against an actress the director felt he had to choose in haste. It’s not an auspicious start, but the resulting film has a great deal of charm. Also, despite its initially rather brutal editing by a team who felt that it was overall ‘too slow’, it carries its own share of contemporary context about the Italy of the day (2).
“Witches don’t exist…if anything, it’s the world we’re living in…”
In the film, we begin by seeing Valentina leaving a party late one evening, refusing a lift home with a male protector, her sometime boyfriend Arno (George Eastman) as she feels perfectly safe to walk back to her apartment on her own. However, on the way, she intercepts a grand old car when she stops it from hitting a stray dog. An equally grand old dame gets out and introduces herself, full of apologies – but tells Valentina that their meeting was preordained in some way. The woman, Baba Yaga herself, takes a personal object from Valentina which she promises to return. Somewhat perplexed, Valentina returns to her apartment, but her encounter with Baba Yaga seems to have troubled her: she has a sequence of Crepax-worthy fantasy dreams, Nazi uniforms and all.
The next day, Baba Yaga visits Valentina and returns her item, inviting Valentina to visit her at home very soon. Valentina goes on with the day job, but things no longer run smoothly for her. Her camera seems to have been sabotaged somehow. A girl gets injured, seemingly by the camera itself. Sensing that something is amiss, and also oddly drawn to the strange older woman, Valentina does visit Baba Yaga, noticing a large hole concealed under the stairs of the ramshackle, otherwise deserted house. Baba Yaga gives Valentina a doll during her visit, telling her that it will ‘protect’ her. It’s wearing fetish gear, but there we are – it’s just another odd moment in a perplexing day. Valentina, almost in a trance, agrees to take the doll with her.
This sequence of events culminates in Valentina quickly losing her cherished autonomy, an autonomy which has in reality been declining ever since Baba Yaga stepped foot outside that car. Valentina’s camera now seems to have been used mysteriously without her knowledge, with images of the doll, Annette, made flesh, appearing in photographs as a real woman. More threateningly, the camera itself is now apparently the property of Baba Yaga, who phones Valentina and tells her to come and retrieve it. When she does so, the enamoured femme fatale subjects her to a bit of lesbian S&M, confining Valentina and whipping her – to a perhaps surprisingly ambiguous response from Valentina. But finally, boyfriend Arno comes to the rescue, flinging his girlfriend’s captors down into the mysterious ‘mouth to hell’ below the house. The punchline to all of this is that, according to a neighbour, the house has not been occupied in many years. Valentina’s would-be female lover was never really there at all…
Meanwhile, as Valentina strives to make sense of what is happening to her, the Milan in which the film is set is in flux, with clashes in social attitudes apparent throughout the film. The struggle between conservative and progressive values is on display throughout, creating a perhaps simplistic, yet uncertain backdrop against which the idea of the supernatural can thrive. It seems to be the case that when times they are a-changing, old beliefs and fears become resurgent. For example, when trying to rebut any notion of supernatural forces at play, Valentina’s companion points out that they are living in the twentieth century – the era of medical advancements, of space travel. But the new Milan is beset by protest and the spectre of revolution, with clashes taking place on the streets. Progress hasn’t swept everyone up just yet, with Milanese slums taking their place on screen alongside the grand architecture and ultra-cool interiors. And, even when the young and the hip seemingly espouse forward-thinking values, such as the burgeoning civil rights movement, Valentina hosts an awareness-raising photoshoot where she photographs a black man who has been directed to channel his ‘primitive drives’, just like his ancestors did. Perhaps it’s well-intentioned, but it does not play well now.
Perhaps oddly, the Church is conspicuous by its absence here, but then again, perhaps that’s the point: the old moral certainties are merely background, entrenched enough to be tedious without being overt, but yet offering nothing in the way of help when something decidedly witchy sneaks back into modern Italy. In Valentina’s case, she may be a part of this new Milan, this Milan of shifting social attitudes, modernisation and protest – but she is also overshadowed by the conservatism which continues to manifest itself in 1970s Italy. As much as she struggles to live on her own terms, she is overcome by a chance event which overtakes her life. And, ultimately, when it comes down to it, she needs a man to come and rescue her: again, old habits die hard.
However, the real threat to Valentina is something completely detached from the modern world she knows. In the film, it’s old money (and ultimately, old magic) which threatens Valentina’s autonomy. In many regards, the appearance of the ‘devil witch’ herself is a manifestation of the dark heart which still beats in modern Milan. Just as progress seems inevitable and very much of one kind, with ideas of feminism and equal rights providing Valentina with definable goals and a path to follow, a chance encounter exposes her to something rather different, something which her pre-existing experiences do not enable her to resist. Via Baba Yaga, sexuality and arcane knowledge subtly interweave themselves into Valentina’s otherwise straightforward, and forward-looking life.
Baba Yaga herself is a strange figure, in that her very name does not belong to Italian folklore and she certainly does not usually appear in the form she takes in Milan. As imagined here, she’s a creative adaptation of an ancient magical being, brought somewhat up to date by Crepax and Farrina (though still very much represented by both of them as a woman of an earlier generation, all old world glamour in her veil and her wide-brimmed hat).
Originally an ancient figure of Slavic myth, the original Baba Yaga appears in many stories in different guises; she’s often an ambiguous figure and she’s perhaps most noteworthy for her enchanted dwelling-place: the Slavic Baba Yaga has a hut with legs – chicken’s legs to be precise – which can move from place to place. Both helping and hindering people according to her mood, Baba Yaga often promises wealth and power, albeit with conditions. Variously attested to as a sorceress, a midwife, a ferocious old crone or a matriarchal figure, she is perhaps an unlikely candidate for Crepax and then Farina to adapt so extensively for a film about Valentina in modern Italy. Then again, though, perhaps via her status as an old, established figure of legend, an ambiguous character who represents a pre-modern world, Baba Yaga is herself the perfect witch, a woman who adapts and shapeshifts one more time, proving to modern Italy that it’s not safe just yet. Her new incarnation as a mysteriously wealthy stranger, with all the trappings of old money – the Rolls Royce, the sprawling (if ramshackle) estate, the effete but likely expensive garb – combines with her supernatural abilities to endanger and seduce Valentina. It’s an assault on two fronts, if you like, old money and old magic, and it that respect Baba Yaga is the ideal figure to cross over into a changeable, even fraught modern-day Milan.
“Milan is beautiful in fog, like a woman with a veil”
Baba Yaga also makes use of old and new forms of magic – representing ancient European beliefs about witchcraft with her ability to shapeshift, her enchantment of Valentina’s item and her delivery of a ‘familiar’ to infiltrate Valentina’s life. These are all abilities which hark back to the medieval period, or indeed earlier, where (usually) women were accused of changing their physical forms and of charming people via stealing items, which they would then enchant. Baba Yaga knows how to do all of these things; here, as the apparent custodian of hell itself, her practices definitely reach back through time, her links to the past coming via her ancient name and her recognisable practices. Not for nothing does Baba Yaga have a clock with no hands, hanging in her abode: it seems to symbolise her permanence, but also her position as someone not operating under the usual confines of time. However, Baba Yaga has also moved with the times in other respects. In this, she is a figure all about revolutionising magic, making it fit into the modern world in which it needs to operate. A key way in which it does this is via the medium of photography, with the object of the camera forming a connection between past beliefs and present concerns, a relatively new technological advancement (at least in an affordable, available form) which begins to operate under the thrall of ancient witchcraft.
Valentina, as a professional photographer, uses her camera as her locus of control over her life: the camera provides her a living, it’s the bedrock of her career and her means of controlling her immediate environment, as she directs her subjects to where she wants them. She often poses her subjects erotically too, which could form a contrast to how she ends up later in the film – being controlled, rather than doing the controlling. She is therefore in charge of so many aspects of her life thanks to the good quality camera equipment available by the 1970s. So, when her camera is enchanted by Baba Yaga, Valentina is massively destabilised by this. Suddenly, she is no longer in control of her world, and worse still, the camera begins to act like an instant hex, with one protester Valentina photographs falling down as if dead when she presses the button.
All of this is strange and terrifying enough, but Baba Yaga reminds us that photography itself is a kind of witchcraft in many respects; all Baba Yaga is doing is making this relationship more overt. The concept of ‘glamour’, which we now associate with the narrower sense of pleasing artifice and good looks is the basis for Valentina’s career, but the word itself has formerly enjoyed more of a witchy meaning, in the sense of the manipulation of reality via witchcraft. Its literal meaning was at first ‘magic spell’. The word has now come full circle, with an array of witchcraft-lite spell books recommending ways for young devotees to utilise glamour magic, including improving their good looks, no doubt intended for the generation which first encountered this idea in The Craft (1996). Photography can also misrepresent truths to us, creating a deception, freezing a moment forever in time – the great impossibility made possible. All of these things have a kind of magic to them, and it’s little surprise that Baba Yaga makes the camera into a battleground in her domination of Valentina.
Another development within the film relates to the introduction of the familiar, Annette, given to Valentina by Baba Yaga to watch over her. Like any good witch’s familiar, Annette does what her mistress bids her to do, but in so doing she herself inhabits Valentina’s world, again through photography. Annette begins to appear as a real woman on Valentina’s developed rolls of film, insinuating that she has a life of her own – she isn’t just a doll, and she has the ability to move around of her own accord, a direct emblem of Baba Yaga’s sexual desire to control and isolate Valentina. The fact that we see Valentina and Arno attending a screening of the Expressionist classic horror The Golem earlier in the film paves the way for this later development, given that Annette is herself a seemingly inanimate doll, brought to life and controlled by a sorcerer. No one believes Valentina that the strange doll is getting up and walking around, of course, but the evidence is there in her photos; how else could it be accounted for? Annette allows her mistress, and her sexual desires, to more fully infiltrate Valentina’s life.
Of course, as we’re talking about old meeting new in this film, it can’t be ignored that Annette herself is rather singularly attired. Annette is not dressed in the whimsical frills you might expect for an old-fashioned porcelain doll, the kind she first she appears to be: instead she is clad in fetish gear, studded leather with a collar and straps, an outfit she retains when she magically transforms into a real girl. Crepax has a predilection for this kind of wear, naturally linking it with niche sexualities which take place on the fringes of modern society – even in enlightened Milan. The film’s lesbian subtext is also on the fringes of what would be considered mainstream and acceptable, here turned to the purpose of adding more scandalous and titillating content to the narrative. Lesbianism, whilst now more accepted overall than it had been in Italian generations past, was still itself often not discussed or acknowledged openly. Whilst many Italian women ‘came out’ as a result of the efforts of groups like Fuori! (Out!), these organisations tended to be male-dominated, and even feminist groups often reacted to lesbians in their midst with a kind of awkward silence (4). This attests to the confluence of taboos which Baba Yaga is able to weave into its narrative – as well as its balancing act between erotica and horror, which in its own way reflects the surge in occult-themed magazines and pulp fiction taking place elsewhere, and having an impact on other cinematic projects.
Baba Yaga’s witchcraft might not be grisly or destructive in the ways that the dark arts are represented elsewhere in film. Nor does it particularly occupy a great deal of screen time, come to that. But its real power is in its hold over an otherwise independent girl, a girl who previously thought she belonged very much to a modern world where magic no longer existed. In this regard, Baba Yaga represents witchcraft’s great adaptability and its resourcefulness, as well as speaking to a kind of anxiety – that these old forces could come back. This is very much a shared anxiety in witchcraft cinema, though seldom given such an ambitious and unusual artistic treatment as it received via artist Guido Crepax and director Corrado Farina in this singular witchcraft film.
References:
(1) Cara Takakjian, Bound and Dreaming: Female Empowerment through Sado-Masochistic Fantasy in Guido Crepax’s Valentina. Interdisciplinary Comics Studies, Vol. 7 no, 4. (2) Curti, Roberto (2016). Diabolika: Supercriminals, Superheroes and the Comic Book Universe in Italian Cinema. Midnight Marquee Press (p.139) (3) Attributed to Ornella Vanoni. (4) Wilson, Perry (2009) Women in Twentieth-Century Italy. Macmillan International Higher Education (p.154).
(And yes, I can rightly say that, because I live in York…)
In many respects, it’s strange that a city like York – professedly the most haunted city in England – went for so many years without hosting a horror film festival of its own, but since 2020, Dead Northern has been steadily growing in size and reputation as a regional festival, there for both the avid festival-goers to fill the void between London’s FrightFest and the Halloween-season horror festivals which get going in October, and for those cinema-goers who simply want to support a wide range of genre cinema and events in a very beautiful city (again, bias acknowledged).
For anyone who hasn’t been here, York is a genuinely great place to visit. It has a long and illustrious history, vitally important to the Romans, Saxons and Vikings in turn, with that history visible to a greater or lesser extent in every street and space. All of the following are within easy walking distance of the festival: York Minster, one of the greatest European cathedrals of the medieval period; Museum Gardens – monastic ruins from the Tudor-era Dissolution – and the Yorkshire Museum; the city walls, which are walkable; Clifford’s Tower, the remains of the castle first established by William the Conqueror, and let’s not forget the grave of Dick Turpin – well, the stone at least, as his body was exhumed and moved around by York residents after his first burial, as you do.
Dead Reset
But back to the festival! Hosted at York City Screen, Dead Northern runs for three full days – Friday 25th September through Sunday 27th – and will be running a diverse programme of short films and features, with a number of premieres and supporting events. There are two world premieres: Evil Thread, a sentient fashion horror in line with the likes of Slaxx, and Darling, as well as three UK premieres. These are: Free Buffet (a couple with an All-You-Can-Eat buffet facing down bankruptcy, murderous plans and a dark night of the soul); The First Day (an apocalyptic horror we can all enjoy while we hope we don’t face down a real one) and Game Over, where an urban myth meets grisly gamer lore. You can also look out for marine horror, found footage horror, a mockumentary, Wicker-Man adjacent folk horror in Wrath of the Gods, some Filipino mythological horror in Aswang and a late-night screening of the classic sci-fi horror Aliens.
The festival clearly has a lot of love for the short film format – rightly so – and will be running more than fifty short films (including a block of music videos) across the three days: these run in separate screening blocks, organised broadly by theme – so take your pick between body horror, comic carnage, terrifying futurescapes, psychological meltdowns and monsters. Around the schedule, there will be Q&As, talks and a ghost story event – Spirits with Spirits – plus a range of vendors. York City Screen is a Picturehouse cinema, so the food and drink available are really good, too. It’s a good place to be.
Should you meet your heroes? Oh god, no – that’s the takeaway from Starsuckers (2026), a new entrant in the understandably-growing new subgenre of social media horror, even if it only ever really dabbles with horror elements. It’s about how vulnerable people now venerate dreadful Influencers, and possibly about the moment of realisation that the lifestyle package being sold isn’t all it seems. The film does suffer, however, by trying to switcheroo into ever-more meta elements, which dilutes some of the wry comedy and winning lines it offers along the way.
We start with a voiceover (at least for some of the runtime) seemingly there to let us know, in no uncertain terms, that washed-up actor George, sorry, Bjorg (James Alex) and his partner, wellness empire founder Sasha (Manon Ens-Lapointe) are there to be loathed. Now at the end point of their five-year relationship contract, they’ve ended up with a newborn baby; Baby is profoundly disappointing, cries a lot and doesn’t promise good content generation. Content and comebacks are what motivate Sasha and Bjorg respectively. Luckily, Sasha’s new plans for a weekend wellness retreat could offer at least some good, shareable material. She has opened it up to ‘civilians’, and Sasha’s quite looking forward to mingling with the winners, whoever they might be. About that: step forward, Eileen (Jersey Anderson) and Chuck (Jacob Stickles), whose very real recent traumas and backstories seem to pale into insignificance when it comes to their adoration of the Influencer couple. Bjorg and Sasha loved their laudatory video message, and decide to invite them to the retreat (actually an Airbnb rental) so they can all get to know one another.
After the initial meet-up, during which Eileen in particular seems ridiculously starstruck, it isn’t long at all before Sasha and Bjorg reveal that they have a lot more lined up than just meditation and smoothies. In fact, they have a big task for their ‘guests’ to perform in order to move on to whatever else they have in mind. It’s a big test of that devotion, but it’s key to the kind of trauma work-through which these hapless civvies need in their lives.
As above, in recent years we’ve had a steady number of new films mocking the social media generation with varying levels of seriousness – and no wonder. It’s all so mockable. But what you’re probably wondering – or reflecting on, if you’re reading this after seeing the film – is how Starsuckers (2026) fits into the genre, and what it offers which is particularly commendable, or stand-out in some way. It’s certainly very dialogue-heavy, a choice which it maintains throughout the runtime, but it sets up an engaging enough first act, right before tantalising a shift into far more grisly fare, which suggests a totally different gloss to proceedings.
This is the moment, probably, where the film either grabs you or loses you, as despite tantalising an about-face, that surprise violent twist doesn’t, in the end, firmly establish a new, concerted style. Starsuckers promises a big kick-off, but then dithers, and its characters do a lot of dithering, too, with Eileen and Chuck first horrified, then accepting, then adulatory, then critical, then right back to feeling a different way. Of course budgetary restraints probably did some damage to what was possible here, and ditto the odd moment of rather jarring CGI, but that isn’t it. The problem here is that the film doesn’t really seem like it’s set on an approach, and despite having a final act, it’s arguably used to try to do too much, adding in different metatextual elements in places and resorting to heavy-handed bloviation and ‘did they get that?’ satire in others. It also hints at some violence to come which never makes it to the screen, and if this is an invitation for horror fans to reconsider their generic expectations, then I fear that it may fall flat. Ditto, the possibility of a purely metaphorical reading of all that goes on.
Nonetheless, there are some very funny lines here, and the lead actors (in this micro-cast) show that they’re very willing to commit to the bit. The better scenes are the live action scenes with some practical effects thrown in, and Starsuckers‘s acceptance that parasocial relationships can either make you angry or make you laugh – choosing the latter, by and large – is fine. The more serious point, the exploitation of hapless consumers by a dreadful nouveau riche, can always take development and there are certainly crowd-pleasing moments during the course of the film. No one can accuse the Butler Brothers – whose previous films Unfriending (2023) and Purgatory Jack (2023) have both been reviewed at Warped Perspective – of seeking to pigeonhole their filmmaking styles or themes, and both sharp scripts and engaging ideas have featured in all of their films so far, but perhaps a stronger sense of pace and more emphasis on action would just lift their work that little bit higher moving forward. Starsuckers has the bones of a great idea and a few hints at how that great idea could have been – and has been – developed, but at points it spins off into places which pull our attention away from the more successful elements.
Starsuckers (2026) received its world premiere at FrightFest 2026.
There’s a popular line of films and television which consists of finding an idyllic (or idyllic-seeming) retro America, and then menacing it with something bloody horrible – as if to say it was never that good, not really, but also because once you’ve created a weird feeling of audience deja-vu over the clothes, toys and TV – if the audience is of a certain age, at least – then you need to do something with that, and why not showcase all those vintage bikes by having their owners pedalling for their lives? To be fair, though, The End of Oak Street (2026) isn’t simply a new spin on the kiddie horror we might so easily recognise. Instead, it shifts its attentions slightly to the nuclear family, lobs in some quantum physics and then successfully assaults said family with a slew of timeline-defying dinosaur species, all now furry and feathered in line with up-to-date dino-knowledge (which also makes them look more Eighties), but all continuously hungry – and amazingly quick to adapt to suburbia.
Let’s break that down a little more. We begin the film at a sunny, smiley block party in the early Eighties, as briefly and specifically established by a snippet of music and a glimpse of a TV show, where we meet the Platt family: there’s dad Greg (Ewan MacGregor), mother Denise (Ann Hathaway) and kids Brian (Christian Convery) and budding astrophysicist Audrey (Maisy Stella). There’s trouble in paradise: Denise and Greg have differing parenting styles, and it seems that she’s on the cusp of walking out on the family, now that the catharsis of fantasising about doing this in her novel manuscript just isn’t as cathartic anymore. However, all of this is about to be superseded by some strange goings-on (which you may already have heard being hinted at on the radio). At first, odd things start turning up: a long-extinct plant in one neighbour’s yard, a pile of mystery dung in another; but then the strange, brilliant light which seems to herald these odd additions goes one step further and transports the entire neighbourhood into the middle of a tropical Jurassic-ish world, where it’s quickly co-opted by the ravening wildlife. You’d swear dinosaurs had been sneaking in through windows all their lives.
Does this sudden, life-endangering shift compel the beleaguered residents of the area to group together, sharing resources, knowledge and weapons to try to survive? It’s always worth being cautious when you start to overlay ideas about political commentary onto… dinosaurs (more so, I’d say, than with other, palimpsest-like movie monsters such as zombies and vampires) but if director David Robert Mitchell – who gave us the ultimate palimpsest monster in It Follows (2014) – happened to want to make a comment about the dangers (or perhaps benefits!) of eschewing community for the insular family unit, then he’s done it here, because they emphatically do not group together. Admittedly, forming a posse is a challenge when there are great, shaggy-haired dinosaurs lumbering through the streets, but it’s interesting that the Platt family’s interest in the plight of their neighbours is momentary at best; at worst, they’ll just hunker down and watch the guy next door getting pecked to death by a mob of pterodactyls. It’s so pronounced, the Platts barely even use any of their neighbours’ names. We don’t know if they’d have been any better off had they attempted to help others (though we do see that those who help them actually seem to end up doing a lot worse), but certainly, any broader interest in suburban living is quickly set aside here, although Team Platt does eventually admit one more member – newly-orphaned new girl, Jeannette (Jordan Alexa Davis). Now: how are they going to escape? If they were transported here, can they use the same means to travel back?
So that’s the narrative frame. There’s a certain amount of engineered peril in places – often because a) the Platt family have a dog that they never bring indoors and b) they haven’t taught the same dog any recall, so he keeps running off, which prompts to Brian to climb out of the house to rescue him, which means his sister has to go look for Brian, and so on. However, despite this, and despite some similarity between dinosaur pursuit scenes (with lots of ‘it’s behind you’ going on), the creatures themselves look pretty good, though arguably Mitchell’s relish for killing off/menacing domestic cats won’t make him many friends, not least because we all know the cats would probably outlive the people. The human side of the ordeal is pretty bloodless, though, which enables it to feel borderline comedic in places (you see the flinging around but not the macerated body parts) and arguably, there are some – only some – comedic scenes to offset some of the tension and some of the more repetitive aspects of the film as a whole (because there’s only so much dinosaurs are ever going to do).
Overall, The End of Oak Street is an enjoyable enough film, even if it lacks some of the gravitas of It Follows and instead operates like a pulpy, retrospective riff on – and I realise this isn’t the first time this comparison is being made – early Spielberg, bigger budget and all. There’s a bit of Chris Columbus in here too, that same adventure aspect coupled with a family dynamic – right down to a fantastical antipathy to the possibility of parents getting divorced; here, instead of Mrs Doubtfire gaining access to a broken/breaking home, it’s a velociraptor, but the end result is similar. If you have been waiting for an honest-to-goodness dinosaur movie and you don’t mind any set-up to get there, then you will love this; fussier viewers might scratch their heads at the fact there are more split diopter shots here than guns – in America! – but hey, it’s still fun.
In a day and age when we’re being told that no one wants to go and watch films at the cinema anymore, it’s heartening that here in the UK – and of course, elsewhere in the world – independent film festivals persist in springing up and being (whisper it) a popular, fun way to spend a weekend, a means to support new, independent cinema, and an opportunity to watch tried-and-tested classics of the genre on the big screen. Whether you opt to spend your time with the big hitters like FrightFest, or smaller, grassroots projects (or indeed all of the above), there’s nothing quite like watching films with people who love them enough to send up a round of applause at the end credits. With that same vibe in mind, for the past five years Marc Brimfield has been running a film festival of his own. The Phantasmagoria Film Festival, which takes place in North Wales. We got to chat with Marc about his experiences so far, the current state of play for film fans, festival organisers and festival attendees and that all-important ticketing info!
WP: Thanks for talking to us, Marc! Let’s start at the top: there are a few horror festivals, large and small, currently running in the UK: why establish one in Wrexham? And what has the experience of running a festival been like so far for you?
MB: The main reason for starting a festival was simply my experience at the Abertoir Festival. I had been to festivals before, but I suffer badly with anxiety and with my autism, I find it hard to connect with people. But then Abertoir was warm, friendly and had a relaxed vibe, while still having some of the best programming and guests on the UK festival circuit. I made friends and came a long way out of my shell and I thought if I could do this in my area, even if it was for one person, then I would have done something truly great, and I like to think I have. My audience attendants are low, but the people keep coming back every year and last year I was in tears when the father of a man with significant disabilities told me his son waits all year for it. Nothing had more value to me than those words. Don’t get me wrong, it’s hard, it costs a lot of money, and even with funding, most of the time you are a lot of money out-of-pocket. But for me and my wife, it’s worth it.
WP: What have been your personal highlights from Phantasmagoria so far?
MB: Personal highlights for me, guest-wise – we have been very lucky on our budget – we welcomed 70s exploitation writer David McGillivray. As someone who loved films like House of Whipcord and Satan’s Slave, having him was a big highlight and he was very engaging with the audience. But we have also had more mainstream guests like Robin Ince and Jeremy Dyson, who not only went down well as guests, but wanted to hang out all weekend with everyone, which was fantastic. Some of our indie filmmakers who do so much PR for us like Kemal Yildirim, Michael Fausti and MJ Dixon have become staples, regularly submitting and always attending each year. Film-wise, for me it has to be the 40th anniversary screening of House of the Long Shadows with an introduction from Pete Walker and a Q&A with Julie Peasgood. It was one of the 1st VHS videos I ever bought as a kid and it has held a special place for me, so to not only talk with the director and one of the lead actors, but to also see the film with an audience – this screening may never be topped.
WP: You have opted for a slasher theme this year: talk us through that, and why/how you have chosen your titles...
MB: The theme came about because of an offer from MJ Dixon to show a film from his back catalogue free of charge! And since we were already planning on showing his 13th film, Bannister Doll Heist, we thought how great it would be to show his 1st film Slasher House too, and do a Q&A. It then made sense to do a slasher theme, but anyone can show Halloween or Scream so I had a think and after chasing two films to a dead end (Evil Dead Trap from Japan and Grave Robbers from Mexico) we realised we had to be a little less ambitious, but still interesting. So after seeing what we could and couldn’t get, we worked out that we need a 15 rated film, as our Friday is 15 plus, and decided that April Fools Day was the obvious fit. Not only does it tick that 15 box, but it also has the most original twist for an 80s slasher. Next, we needed something from the seedier side of horror, so Don’t Go In The Woods, the video nasty, was our next pick. Now I know it’s not a masterpiece, but it has the added bonus of almost never being shown on the big (or in our case medium-sized) screen, and that for me made it interesting: where else will you get to see it? We’ve followed this with Happy Birthday to Me, very 80s but with a big budget, a great director and inventive kills. Then some names people do know but are still not too obvious, as that’s our goal. We needed a Friday The 13th so which one; it can’t be 1, 2, 3 or 6 as these are all well-loved and get screened regularly, so – what’s left? I thought, out of all them, the only one I have never seen on the big screen is Jason Goes to Hell, so why not? it’s fun and silly and a perfect fit for the festival vibe. We still needed a staple, so Urban Legends was the only true choice.
WP: If people fancied coming along to the festival, what should first timers know about Wrexham itself?
MB: Wrexham has a rich history from being the burial site of Elihu Yale, and Wrexham Steeple is known for being one of the seven wonders of Wales. We also have Wrexham Lager, that’s one of the oldest breweries in the UK, and was actually served on the Titanic. Now of course the city is famous for its Ryan Reynolds connection. We are in one of Wrexham’s villages on the edge of the town. The venue itself is full of history, it was a theatre until the 1920s, where it became a cinema up to 1960. The upper floor balcony still has its original seats, so I love that I have brought a small part of its history back with the festival.
WP: As a festival with a balance of classic cinema and newer, independent titles, what have you noticed – if anything – about the newer horrors coming through? Are there any particular trends or ideas which you are seeing more and more of – any you particularly like? What would help a film get selected for Phantasmagoria?
MB: I think as a whole, new cinema does follow trends, but the beauty of independent film is that it’s very varied. From arthouse time travel pieces about revenge to werewolves in space, from dark themes like domestic abuse to out-and-out B movies and love letters to past films. As indie filmmakers mostly self-release, they don’t have the constraints of what will sell in the box office, or what the masses will like. It’s more like: this is my story, come experience it and if you don’t like it, it’s fine, but we are very proud of it, and I think that’s how film should be. Too often a good film comes along, and then you have three years of films that are ever-decreasing imitations. You will never get that with independent cinema. Even if a film shares its themes with another, it’s still its own entity, going its own way and it’s not apologetic about anything it does. Submissions for us are broken into three main things we look for: firstly, a good story, it does not matter if the budget is £1000 or £100000; if the story is good, it transcends its limitations of budget. Then it needs to have heart, maybe for me that’s the most important thing, and finally it needs to be original. We also put a high priority on films with cover letters: if they try and sell their vision to us with their own words, it goes a long way.
WP: Finally – if there’s anything we haven’t covered, please take the opportunity to talk about it here!
MB: I am a big believer in building a community. That’s why we have always said we don’t want to be the biggest or the best, we just want to show good films to good people, creating a safe space for all walks of life. Horror can be brutal, it can be disturbing, but it is supported by a community of gentle souls, and that’s what our festival’s about. It’s why we cap the amount of ticket sales, so we have space for people to not feel crammed in, and so that we have time to talk to people in a relaxed way. That will always be our ethos, as well as keeping things affordable. We charge just £25 for three days full of films, or £13 for a day ticket – as well as selling cheap but nutritious home-cooked stews and curries, all for under £3! We’re also good with letting people bring their own food in, so it can truly be accessible to any budget.
WP: Many thanks to Marc at Wrexham’s Phantasmagoria Film Festival, which runs from October 2nd – 4th 2026 at the George Edwards Hall in Wrexham. For more information, including tickets, please click here.
A nightmarish (and as-yet mysterious) opening scene segues into what appears to be something like normal life, as we get started with Night After Night (2026): this is a false impression which persists as a motif throughout this alienating, unsettling film. We meet security guard Andy (Scott Poythress) and his buddy Willis (Johnny Sibilly). They work for an exclusive university – acres of space, polished concrete, you know the type of place – and the two men develop a grudging work friendship. However, Andy values the discreet, even secretive work environment he has found. He isn’t apparently too keen on building bonds. Alternating between a lonely motel room and his place of work, he has apparently quite deliberately moved to the periphery of the everyday.
Having already reviewed the fantastic Recluse(2026) this year, it’s already clear that director Josh Lobo is already a master at sculpting an uneasy, rising atmosphere. And as in Recluse, Night After Night doesn’t need to travel much distance in order to generate that feeling. It has that same sense of tense, febrile outsidership; although Andy speaks directly to the audience via a voiceover, the presence of the voiceover can’t quite offer the consoling hook which it might: it, too, is struggling with the film’s emerging world. Audio design, also fundamental in Recluse, cloaks Night After Night in a similar weirdness, despite not being a plot point in its own right here. By the time Andy gets temporarily moved to a solo night shift, we’re ready for the persistent sense of something nightmarish – aural and visual – to bloom.
This it does. Whilst exploring the building, Andy finds a hitherto-hidden room, which he feels inclined to investigate. When he shines his torchlight into the room, he sees a mysterious, naked figure, cowering from him.
He’s unsure what to do (and well he might be); unable to confront the figure, he contacts his mysterious boss (Alexis Louder) but her advice is only this: use your best judgement. Arguably, he’s already a long way beyond ‘best judgement’. Poythress looks authentically exhausted and nervy from the start of this film; his estrangement from his family is briefly treated, but it’s enough to ground his mental state in something tangible. He soon enough sees other, different, nude, voiceless people in the building. Is this a haunting? Are they really there? Beyond Willis, the only communication he really has is with Therese, a woman living out of the motel room next door to his own. A faceless woman, discussing voiceless figures. When the film shifts its attentions briefly back to Willis (via an intertitle, a device I hate but which actually works here), we can expand our understanding somewhat – even if via two alienated men with compartmentalised lives and a sense of ingrained ennui, although each man reacts to the situation differently. As the figures keep on appearing, it could be that they are linked, in some way, to the mysterious work and ethos of the university itself. Equally, it could be a much more singular ordeal, simply brought out by these unique surroundings.
Whilst Night After Night offers brief hints of other films – it’s hard not to make some comparisons with It Follows and even The Shining – it also deviates from those, as this emphatically is not a clear narrative with clear, agreed-upon supernatural aspects. Its more… evasive than that, and its symbolic, even solipsistic approach (contrasted with the later arrival of another security guard, who tries to overlay meaning on the mysterious place where they work) will alienate some viewers. However, its broader, more malleable approach really does reward the attention. Cinematographer Bryce Holden has done it again, and the film’s artistic shooting style (blending timelines, high colour, black and white, negative flash transitions, a range of edits) serves its approach and ethos very well.
It’s heavy on the mystery, it’s more periphery than plot, and Night After Night works best when you accept its dedication to quieter moments of creeping alarm, where you could, if you were so inclined, project some of your own anxieties (Lobo has stated the film is a means of channelling his own anxieties about the world). It’s slow-burn, but in the year which invited us into the liminal spaces ofBackrooms (2026) it certainly seems as though the surreal, shifting world of the after-hours workplace has a lot of diverse horror to offer, and this gloomy, metaphoric mood piece deserves acclaim.
Night After Night (2026) releases on 28th August 2026.
São Paulo party planner Malu (Martha Nowill) has a lot to do, toilet breaks notwithstanding. She has a cake to worry about, there are last-minute arrangements to make, and her twins’ father hasn’t come to pick them up as arranged, which is unhelpful, so she optimises a spare moment by helping to yank out her son Luan’s loose milk tooth. He’s unfazed, so much so that he takes himself back into the toilets for another look and, by jumping up and down on one to see himself in the mirror, ends up impaled to death on shards of porcelain. It’s a lively start, but Bowels of Hell (aka Privadas de Suas Vidas) doesn’t quite turn out to be the horror film which this opening sequence suggests. It’s not quite a comedy, either, and suffers as a whole for its genre-hopping, oddly lax approach to pace and narrative. It’s a shame, though it does have some gloriously OTT scenes along the way – scenes you’d fairly expect from the title, premise and opener.
Years pass: we see Malu answering nature’s call again, but rather more unsuccessfully; after losing her son, it seems that her trauma has manifested itself in chronic constipation, to the point that she appears to be pregnant and suffers from a lot of the secondary symptoms: she’s often nauseous and faint. Her daughter Luana now identifies as non-binary and goes by a new name – Genesis – but there have been complaints at school about them dedicating more time to gender ideology than their other studies, and they risk expulsion as a result. Malu is worried by this, but she isn’t on board with Genesis’s pronouns or name change either, and the two are frequently at loggerheads about it. Genesis’s disdain for gender norms extends to an upcoming gender reveal party which Malu is planning for an obnoxious Momfluencer who lives in their apartment building; Genesis sees it as an emblem of everything which is wrong with society, but Malu is taking the job regardless: she needs the money. It’s when she gets to know ahead of time that the new mother (Chandelly Braz) is pregnant with twins that her own symptoms start to worsen; during a routine vomiting session, she is devastated when she loses her son’s milk tooth necklace down her toilet, and the combination of blood, vomit and tooth causes something malign and murderous to manifest in all of the toilets in the building.
Why? We don’t know really. There’s no lore here; there’s no ritual, acknowledged or otherwise; there’s no extra-terrestrial presence. We just accept there’s a new, angry and unseen entity which now manifests in the pipework of the building and hates the people using its, erm, facilities. But it bides its time…
We’re fairly familiar with scatological (mainstream, mainstream) cinema by this point, and usually encouraged to laugh, or feel disgusted; occasionally, we’re asked to feel grossed out to the point that it becomes a trial. From I Bought a Vampire Motorcycle to Butt Boy via Bad Milo, there’s plenty of gross-out laughter, although the latter manages to successfully pivot into a surprisingly touching story about mental health and wellbeing. Last year, Fantasia screenedFlush, which placed a version of ordeal horror in a dilapidated toilet cubicle; the smallest room is a surprisingly versatile setting. Here, though you have to wait for it, there are some fantastic, bold practical FX, even if they are condensed in terms of the runtime allowed for them. It’s accepting the blend between the psychology of grief and repression and the unexplained toilet gore which is a harder sell.
A suspicion develops by around the twenty-minute mark, and extending for quite a spell beyond twenty minutes, that the film’s decision to pause – setting aside the horror elements which we are probably ready for by now – is so it can introduce a raft of different characters, and not just so that something awful and scatological can happen to them (though you also know that it will, eventually). A number of social justice topics are alluded to, and several characters are in here so that those topics can be explored. We get to see all of their various quirks – the inclusion of toilet roll theft is a strange choice, in a film where no one ever seems to wipe – but in many cases, the film is often mean-spirited in ways which feel unnecessary. Complete and balanced redemption for characters who are given cruel treatment isn’t mandatory, of course, but you note the decision itself. To allow itself so many of these grim little vignettes, the pace grinds to a halt; accepting that the film has undergone a title change for Anglophone markets (its original title means Deprived of Their Lives, which strikes a rather different note), ‘Bowels of Hell’ sounds like it should have a touch of urgency, doesn’t it? When you remember that the film runs to nearly two hours – well, 111 minutes – patience for what can be done with the not-quite horror, not-quite comedy and not-quite camp arthouse stylings begins to wane.
Still, the actors’ wholehearted dedication to what they’re doing, the energetic summing-up and the best of the film’s practical work will win enough audiences over, and Bowels of Hell is certainly a bizarre enough skit to get people talking. It is proudly grubby, rather self-indulgent and in the sheer amount of squabbling and big topics it includes, not really on anyone’s side in a meaningful way, but it certainly has ambition, and if you can forgive a lot in exchange for a seismic shit-spraying finale, then your patience just might get rewarded.
Bowels of Hell (2026) received its North American premiere at the Fantasia International Film Festival. For more details, please click here.
We start with a shock in the opening moments of A Safe Distance (2026), as a tranquil forest setting erupts with a gunshot – and the film then obliquely reveals a body. Two women silently depart the scene, clean themselves up and then hitch their way out of there, finding their way to the nearest bus station. Finally, they talk – at least a little. They’re heading to Winnipeg; they’ve done it; they’re free. The substance of this victorious moment, and how we get to this point, is the subject of the rest of the film.
We then seem to move back in time, meeting thirtysomething couple Joey (Chris McNally and Alex (Bethany Brown), the latter of whom we have already briefly met. As they drive, they discuss a spate of recent bank robberies in the area, the freedom it would bring and so on – all pipe dreams of course, a mere distraction as they make their way to the start of an anniversary hike and camping trip in the woods.
This isn’t really Alex’s thing, but that’s seemingly of little note to Joey. It probably isn’t really his thing, either, though he does have some limited camping experience and a bit of macho bluster to carry him through. As such, he convinces Alex to accompany him on a hike up a nearby mountain, to enjoy the beautiful view it affords. She’s reluctant, but dutifully follows along. It turns out that this is all part of Joey’s plans to propose to her, but at the big moment, Alex hesitates, long enough to make it clear that the answer isn’t an unqualified ‘yes’, and Joey’s feelings are hurt. By the following morning, he has made the decision (and apparently this is a thing) to abandon her out there. She wakes up alone, with no means of navigating and no food and drink. Happy anniversary!
Lost and soon injured, too, Alex is fortunate enough to encounter two other campers, Kianna (Tandia Mercedes) and Matt (Cody Kearsley), who assist her – though there are some significant looks being exchanged between them, and a sense that Alex may have stumbled onto something. Still, she sticks with them. As time ticks on, however, Alex finds herself becoming way too inveigled in Kianna and Matt’s business, and then – as she becomes more intimate with Kianna – implicated in it.
I have commented on this in a number of reviews of films which use the same sort of ‘90% along then loop back’ framework, as it’s a popular device amongst filmmakers, particularly in thrillers and horrors. It allows for a punchy cold open, as here, but it’s still arguably both a temptation and a risk. Having revealed something very significant, the film is then under pressure to link back up with this in a meaningful way, though at least some of its tension and surprise has usually been sacrificed to do it. That pressure is increased here by various clues, readily offered up by the film from the very beginning (and used several times throughout). It leaves a tough sell for director Gloria Mercer – who has previously directed a short film by the same title, containing similar plot points.
However, she chooses to concentrate her efforts on key aspects of the relationship-building here, and even with the inclusion of a couple of slightly clunkier plot points, it works: both Brown and Mercedes are great in their roles. Some of the gender politics in the script feel overwritten, though perhaps there’s a kind of rough justice in rendering the male characters into stereotypes as a means of progressing the plot, but A Safe Distance by and large looks great, with a good balance between remote wilderness and intimate spaces, with just the right amount of impetus and interest to keep things going.
You always know that more is coming here, and the sense of two women finding far more solace in one another than in their partners works well. There’s a spark there. All told, A Safe Distance is doing a lot of things well, and if the element of surprise is (mostly) in short supply, then what we do have is a decent sense of isolation, characterisation and redemption in a neat crime thriller.
A Safe Distance received its Canadian premiere on 30th July at the Fantasia International Film Festival. For more information, please click here.
