Every year, if we’re lucky, we’ll encounter a short film at a festival which just blows us away. The affordances and limitations of the short movie medium provides so many opportunities for filmmakers to showcase their ideas, making them render these ideas in an economical manner, but nonetheless – if successful – weaving a story which indelibly stays with the audience. This is very much the case with a short film I encountered at this year’s Celluloid Screams Festival in Sheffield, UK. Hang Up! takes a very simple idea – that of someone making a mobile phone call by accident, just like we all have – and takes this idea forward, escalating the tension in a series of hand-over-mouth shocking ways, as husband Gary finds himself listening in on a conversation his wife, Emelia, is having about him. It turns out that his happy, stable life is anything but – and his wife doesn’t feel about him the way she has been enacting over the years. It’s a plausible, everyday set-up – and director/writer Richard Powell develops this horrid, believable framework in an engrossing manner.
I was fortunate to get to talk to Richard about his film; our interview follows. And, if you get the opportunity to support Hang Up! or any of the other ventures up and coming from Fatal Pictures, have at it. You won’t be sorry.
WP: So my first question…where did the idea for this short film come from?
After working on several considerably more expensive short films over the years, I realized I just wanted to keep working and creating without all the intense cost and time restraints which a larger, FX-driven horror short would entail. I wanted to go back to the basics of filmmaking. I wanted to do something where all we had to rely on was my writing and direction and the performances; no flashy FX or cinematography, just meat and potatoes filmmaking. So that’s what I set out to do, then I had to conjure up a suitable concept – and out of the ether came HANG UP!
WP: As with many good short stories, in film or in print, Hang Up! takes a straightforward idea and plays it out in an increasingly shocking way…did you always have a firm idea of how far you were going to take the plot? Or how you were going to end the film?
I know I loved the simple set up of a butt dial you keep on listening to. I had that, but not what would be heard on the other line. All of the hack ideas came to mind first; a kidnapping or a murder or the like but all that stuff which comes easily to me was ignored because it comes easily for a reason. I sat with the idea until the concept of a disgruntled wife hiring a hitman to kill her husband came up. That was better but still a bit too obvious, but the kernel of a maniacal wife stuck and grew into Hang Up!
WP: Something really impressive about Hang Up! is how you create so much empathy for Gary, who finds himself listening to his wife’s real thoughts about him. Yet he doesn’t really speak. Similarly, Emelia, the wife, communicates an incredible amount of hate and duplicity without even being present in the film! How challenging was it to achieve all of this?
I don’t think it was difficult at all. Relationships/marriages are inherently dramatic and relatable because we’ve all been in them at some point. We can all understand the horror of Gary’s situation, the sheer unexpected shock of it. I also think many filmmakers overestimate what it takes to grip an audience and entertain them. Give me an interesting actor or two and something with some kind of truth in its message, campy or not, and I’m sold. I don’t need much more than that and I don’t give much more than that in Hang Up! and that was exactly my aim. I’ve got kinetic, off the wall ideas up my sleeve but I’m as much in love, if not more so, with quiet human stories.
WP: I think one of the reasons this film really landed for me was how it showed how even our closest relationships are often rather tenuous. Not to the extent described in Hang Up (hopefully!) but certainly, we might think we know someone, but not really know them at all. Was this something you aimed to explore?
To be honest, this theme is something I’m starting to realize I’m subconsciously obsessed with. I have four short films and two feature length scripts that explore this material in some form or another. The idea of a hidden or suppressed self and all the ways that can implode or explode is fascinating to me. I guess it stems from my feeling that most of the conflict and trauma in our lives doesn’t come from external forces, but from internal ones. In the case of Hang Up! Had Emelia simply voiced her frustrations early to her husband they wouldn’t have warped and twisted her into the thing she has become as our film begins.
WP: How have responses been to the film? Personally, I felt like I’d been punched in the gut by the end – pretty impressive for a film a few minutes long…
The response has been great! I think the film is unique, especially in today’s short film climate. I’m asking an audience to wait and listen and be patient, and that isn’t something they are used to in the short film medium. I think that alone creates a rewarding experience. I’ve watched people watching the film and it holds them, despite how static and paced it is; there’s a kind of perverse voyeurism in spying on Gary as his life falls apart while spying on his wife. You feel like you’re hearing and seeing things you shouldn’t be and there is a thrill to it all. I also think the film is darkly funny which makes it palatable considering where it ends up going. I just love that I can have a theatre full of people watch what is essentially a 14 minute monologue and be entertained and disturbed with words and acting and careful shot selection!
WP: Where next for Hang Up! – where else is it going to screen?
Who knows! We will keep sending it out and getting screenings around the world with some kind of eventual release on Blu-Ray, iTunes or Youtube. The film will be touring our home province on Ontario, Canada as part of the Blood in the Spring film Festival next however. We will make sure to post all the information about that and what is next on our social media pages including Twitter. You can find us at @fatalpictures for more!
WP: And finally – what next for Fatal Pictures?
Fatal Pictures is ready to start making feature films, so hopefully you’ll be seeing news of a FAMILIAR feature film based on our short film of the same name soon. We also have plans for a smaller, self financed micro budget feature in the vein of Hang Up! This project will have a similar tone, style and intention as Hang up! but on a larger scale. It’s tough to say what comes next but I’ve got a lot of writing done and to do. I can wait to start getting into the world of feature films where I can really stretch my legs creatively and play with the medium in new and fun ways!
Nicolas Cage has to be one of the most divisive actors out there, as well as one of the most hard-working; in fact, these days it’s actually pretty odd for an actor to garner the kinds of mixed feelings which he inspires, but everyone seemingly has an opinion about his extensive body of work. For me, he swings from borderline unwatchable (Vampire’s Kiss, ack) to phenomenal (Leaving Las Vegas is simply brilliant, just as an example). All I knew then, going in to see Mandy, was one thing: I knew nothing at all about the plot, but I did know that I could expect to see ‘peak Nicolas Cage’ in the film. And, oh my, this is the case. Gloriously so. Mandy also happens to be a perfect vehicle for its lead actor, and one of the best films I’ve ever seen him in. Whilst fairly plot lite, the film’s pace and ambience makes for a thrilling, engrossing viewing experience. I’d say that this could be the best film I’ve seen this year.
I told you it was plot lite and it is, but this is by no means a bad thing; Mandy is more of an aural/visual experience than it is a detailed story, and the characters’ predilection for mind-altering substances gets passed on to the audience via the film’s incredible colour palettes, detailed asides into fictional worlds, pulsing soundtrack and overall talent for hyperbole. Red glowers, grimaces and screams his way through his ordeal, turning into more of a supernatural force than a man. Likewise, the cult members are larger than life themselves, and no pushovers. The biker gang are more like cenobites than regular beings, and the overblown, quasi-religious psychobabble coming from the cultists is matched against their extraordinarily cruel behaviour – Jeremiah in particular (played with full frontal aplomb by Linus Roache) is a deeply menacing figure, very arresting on screen. It’s interesting that the film takes for its title the name of a character who isn’t actually in the film for very long: however, it feels as though Mandy (British actress Andrea Riseborough) is present throughout, even if only as the driving factor behind Red’s escalating lunacy. The film’s quick, almost frenetic pace after the initial assault, supported by varied approaches such as animated sequences and on-screen text, make the film dreamlike, like a fractured memory of something so outlandish it could hardly be believed.
The opening scenes of Knife + Heart feel achingly familiar: how many films start with a woman in peril, running alone through the dark? Well, this is a film which doesn’t mind turning things on their head, even if the surprises are momentary. Anne (Vanessa Paradis) isn’t running from an assailant; she’s having a minor breakdown instead, and when she phones her girlfriend Lois for moral support in the early hours, it proves to be the final straw for her partner of ten years, who breaks off their relationship. It seems as though these drink-fuelled meltdowns are not so unusual. Anne is devastated, but we don’t see her showing weakness to this extent again. She simply gets back to work as a gay porn director, always looking for novel ideas and approaches to use in her films. She regularly sees Lois, who is also her film editor, but she’s trying to get on with her life whilst respecting Lois’s wishes, so they keep a discreet distance.
Along the way, the film also plays with ideas of whether art imitates life, life imitates art, or whether the whole process is somehow cyclical. Anne, always the experimenter when it comes to her work, begins to use the unfolding case as a the inspiration for a very unusual kind of film, writing the real life goings-on into a script and filming a weird new hybrid of erotica and horror. It also transpires that the rest of her filmography plays a key role in the plot, too. All of this – bearing in mind that Knife + Heart is set in 1979 – allows for some glorious visuals. Sequences from Anne’s films are all refracted through plausibly vintage camera and celluloid, though the film itself is just as carefully framed and styled, with rich use of colour and a careful eye for stylistics. The M83 soundtrack is great, too, and fits really well. Paradis, a veteran actress albeit primarily in Francophone cinema, fits the bill perfectly here: whilst you don’t get particularly close to her character, I think that works given the context of the plot, and she looks great, with (and pardon me this observation) a fantastic aesthetic and wardrobe. In fact, it’s nice to see that the two lead female actresses are somewhat older, whilst it’s the guys that are far younger; it’s not an inversion which will change your life, granted, but it’s somewhat refreshing nonetheless, and I didn’t feel that this was simply driven by our current predilection for ‘subverting expectations’ by dithering with gender roles. It just works nicely. There are some very angry user reviews on IMDb complaining about the gay content, though I have to say that after the initial mild surprise of it being men not women getting it on FOR A CHANGE, it too simply settles down as a plot device, a reasonable framework for the rest of the film which allows interesting exploration of its themes.
Tigers Are Not Afraid spins some uncomfortable truths about life in Mexican border towns into a fantastical yarn. In so doing, it embeds its characters in a fairy tale, inviting the audience to see the tale through to the end, and to look for tropes we all recognise. The besieged princess, the ogre, the magical creatures, the three wishes…all present, but all interlaced with realistic horrors. It’s an interesting film which accomplishes a great deal.
All the while, more and more supernatural phenomena are plaguing Estrella. The ghosts of the Huascas’ victims are following her, terrifying her as they implore her to bring them the gang that murdered them. Blood literally and metaphorically begins to course through the children’s lives; dragons and tigers leap from walls and objects; the dead return and speak. Eventually fantasy and reality overlap, stories come to life, but at great cost to people who have already lost a great deal.
Some films excel at that kind of grimy, disconcerting quality which Possum (2018) has in abundance. Every frame of this film makes your skin crawl: it’s a love letter to abandoned places and anonymous spaces, swept through with dead foliage and rot. This, in and of itself, makes the film fairly challenging viewing, even whilst you can appreciate the skill which went into arranging its sets and locations throughout. Add to this an arachnid puppet which seems to stand in for a grown man’s arrested development and mental trauma, and you have a fairly gruelling viewing experience. However, Possum doesn’t lend itself particularly readily to a coherent narrative – with the result that those not hypnotised by its interesting looks might find the whole experience as frustrating as it is unsettling.
As the film progresses, Philip looks authentically more and more haunted by Possum, and seemingly more and more in need of getting things off his chest. It is certainly impressive to see how Harries manages to enact this increasing sense of oppression, as he almost disappears inside himself during the film’s progress. He also looks authentically ill, which is testament at least to the turmoil he’s feeling, even if he describes it very little indeed. In some respects Possum reminds me of the underappreciated Tony (2009), another film with a troubled, but unseemly male main character. As for Philip, his desperation to burn or to ditch the horrible puppet thing is, we see, useless; the more he seems to try to deal with this nightmarish situation, the more Possum appears, spider-limbed and vicious, in his dreams. Some of the sequences in Possum are genuinely unsettling, capturing something of those helpless childhood fears which so many of us seek in the horror cinema we watch as adults. Director/writer Matthew Holness clearly appreciates a good, creeping scare, and can bring a certain sense of a child’s powerlessness to the screen.
A noir-ish montage of images and a voiceover ruminating on the immorality of Hollywood introduces The Queen of Hollywood Blvd, a self-professed crime drama which promises to pitch a hard-bitten club owner against the tactics of a gang of organised criminals. On paper, the film does just this – but the style and tone involved are not what many would expect, and indeed anyone expecting a high-action piece of work would find themselves feeling all at sea after watching this movie. Your tolerance for this take on a crime story depends very much on your tolerance for slow-burn, almost art-house cinema generally.
I also found that some minor issues caught my eye; some continuity issues are in there, but then a bigger issue is that the film’s position in time was unclear. I found myself wondering why, say, one of the crooks had a framed picture of Reagan on the wall and VCRs figure in the plot, but then the streets are full of modern vehicles and the girls at the club have very modern-style tattoos. It could be that the film has opted quite deliberately to belong to that timeless, rootless type of setting which focuses fashionably on the lo-fi and doesn’t want us to know when these events are taking place, but I always find this distracting personally, an attempt to ignore time which makes me wonder about nothing else. (It Follows, I’m looking in your direction here.) But all of these things would be minor, were it not for the fact that The Queen of Hollywood Blvd is, I am afraid to say, quite so slow and ponderous as it is. Its deliberate pace and minimal action means that very little happens within the first hour; unless the atmosphere is note-perfect and engrossing, then this can be alienating. It even risks an audience’s engagement completely, something which worked against it in my case.
Editor’s note: this discussion of Men Behind the Sun contains spoilers.
To make this scene (one amongst many) even more skin-crawling, rumours that this scene contains a real autopsy turns out to be quite true. When a local child died in an accident, Tun Fei Mou somehow prevailed upon the doctors performing the child’s post-mortem to allow him to use footage: the deceased was about the same height and weight as the child actor for the scene, so it has that unsettling note of veritas. The doctors (incredibly) accommodated his request, even dressing in Japanese uniform to complete the procedure. The organs we see being removed are, so we’re told, pig organs rather than human, though it seems an odd concession to modesty when we’ve just seen a real child’s corpse being cut into. Likewise, the notorious ‘rats can overpower a cat’ scene where a cat is apparently mauled to death by rats is now being denied as real by the director, though it looks very, very much like an animal genuinely dies here. This sort of thing could of course never, ever happen today, and it’s bizarre that it ever did, but even if we can’t quite accept it, we can perhaps explain it by the fact that at this time, there was no SFX industry in China, and Tun Fei Mou felt it was of the utmost importance to show the experiments as they really were. He couldn’t have found anyone to make rubber models for key scenes, and even if he could, perhaps this would have gravely affected the film he was trying to make.
There have been many horror films about environmental havoc over the years, but it seems as though frogs have not figured prominently in these. Aside from the game-changing (or even life-changing) Hell Comes to Frogtown and a short cameo in Baskin, frogs have been largely overlooked, so I’ll admit: the press information for Strange Nature won me over via its apparent novelty, speaking of mutant frogs and the like. It’s possibly strange that we’ve seen so few amphibians in horror cinema; frogs have to live with us, have to cope with whatever we flush into the water, and their habitat has an immediate effect on them. This brings us to rural Minnesota, where the story begins.
The film at this juncture could have gone, to my mind, in one of two ways. Either it could have gone all out with glorious excess, using its environmental theme as an excuse to hurl froggy gore at the screen, or else elected to look quite seriously at the topic of pollution and its aftermath. Perhaps surprisingly, at least to my mind, the film largely opts for the latter. This is a very script-heavy film with a lot of dialogue employed to develop character and motivation, though thanks to this it feels a little slow in the middle act, and after Tiffany Shepis departs proceedings very early (she’s criminally underused here, and generally deserves more appreciation for sheer work ethic alone) it feels as though we’ve just been tantalised with the promise of some huge aggressive monster-creature. Instead, Kim is all about exorcising her demons as a former pop singer who made the mistake of insulting the denizens of Tuluth before heading off to a better life, and so she ends up working with the local elementary school science teacher to understand the situation and hopefully alert the locals to what’s happening before it’s Too Late.
You have to hand it to director and writer Fred Dekker. Not only has he made some of the most straightforwardly entertaining films of the past forty years or so, but those films are – for many people – forever wedded to the 1980s, so forming part of people’s nostalgia for a decade when many of them were growing up and experiencing cinema for the first time. Even for those who didn’t see his films within the decade they were made (I never saw the film under discussion here until I was well into adulthood) the effect and the charm seems the same. Dekker might not have set out to set down the 80s for future audiences, but he captures something about them perfectly nonetheless, even when he was imagining a dystopian future, or a time in the past. Although his directorial work is sadly minimal, he has also worked on a number of seminal movies in the capacity of a writer, and he has a very distinguished style which 
Night of the Creeps starts in the 1950s, when an alien skirmish taking place in the skies above Earth results in a mysterious capsule being jettisoned from the craft. It falls to Earth, where it soon threatens to interrupt the romantic pursuits of a group of white-bread young college students, two of whom see it land (and, being idiots, simply have to go and investigate). Oh, there’s a crazed axe murderer on the loose on the same evening; it never rains but it pours. After we see the worst happen with respect to both of these events, we cut to 1986. The weird, weird world of US college life is getting into full swing for that academic year, including the traditions of potential fraternity and sorority house inmates undertaking dangerous/stupid things as ‘pledges’ (seriously, America: why do you do it to yourselves?) Two outsiders, ‘dorks’ Chris (Jason Lively) and best friend J. C. (Steve Marshall) are doing their best to navigate through this new, potentially fraught social situation, as well as hankering after beautiful, probably inaccessible girls like Cynthia Cronenberg (Jill Whitlow). Sadly for them, it turns out that to get anywhere either socially or romantically, they’ll have to actually sign up for a pledge of their own – as set by a group of probable future Republican party candidates, who make it good and difficult. Their task? To break out a cryogenically frozen corpse from the local hospital.
Night of the Creeps also boasts what I think we can now call a classic Dekker script, somewhere between plausible and humane in places, obviously crafted in others, with catchphrases and black humour throughout. It’s a film where you can laugh at the exchanges between Chris and J.C, but also get a true sense of their friendship, right down to a genuine feeling of pity when they’re torn apart. Tom Atkins, one of the most recognisable and beloved figures in cult cinema, is at his best here (in what he’s termed his own favourite film which he appeared in). He’s such a vivid character, but again, when not camping it up and yelling “Thrill me!” down the telephone, the guy can really act. I think that’s it: up against these preposterous turns of events, all of the cast do such a great job, and lend a kind of deserved gravitas to their roles. Their respect for the subject matter makes the storytelling all the more entertaining. Sure, the end of the film (with this ending) tantalises for a sequel which never came, but Night of the Creeps is more than sufficient. As pure entertainment, I can’t fault it.
The Western, pioneered by the likes of Sergio Leone and Sam Peckinpah, is a format which has spawned cinema around the world, with recognisably Western-style filmmaking appearing everywhere, even in the likes of the Convict Scorpion films in Japan during the 70s. However, I think it’s probably fair to say that South Africa isn’t greatly known for Westerns. Given the Western’s emphasis on lawlessness and vigilante justice, though, it’s clear why director Michael Matthews decided to give it a whirl in this setting. That this is his first feature is incredible; the resulting film, Five Fingers for Marseilles, eight years in the making, is a skilled piece of work, if a challenging, weighty experience.
All of this is convincingly, and very movingly carried on the shoulders of the lead actor Vuyo Dabula as Tau, a man who displays a staggering gamut of emotions whilst barely saying a word; he oscillates between rare moments of joy and desperation, and it’s a very absorbing performance throughout. But he is ably supported by his old friends, in particular Zeto Dlomo as the gang’s old sweetheart Lerato, now a grown woman desperate for life to improve for her and her ailing father. A devastating musical score pulls on the heartstrings even more, with its long, low incidental notes underscoring the tragedy unfolding on-screen. I do feel that the film plays out as a tragedy in many respects, because for all of the nods to the great Westerns of the past, there’s an overarching dour atmosphere here of impending doom, right from the start, where any expectations we might have for a gang of children on our screens are ultimately taken in a different direction; I don’t think you ever feel that people are going to ride off happily into the sunset. The film looks spectacular, an engaging visual blend of landscape and townscape, myth and reality – with certain characters, such as the ominous gang leader, seeming almost supernatural in some scenes. Commentary on the presence of ‘the land’ as the ultimate arbiter of man’s affairs even leans towards folklore, albeit ultimately played out in gritty, hard-hitting and realist fashion. It’s also interesting to get a film which plays out in a variety of different languages: English is a lingua franca, but the characters code-switch throughout, using Sotho and Xhosa in turn, too. This helps to ground the action in its setting, as well as bringing native languages to the fore, as spoken by the people who live in these areas.
Spoiler warning.
I reference the ‘cut-and-shut’ idea above because one criticism of Martyrs is how it shifts from the intimation of supernatural horror to something altogether different in its second act, as the film’s supernatural content gets closed off not just to the audience, but also to the people trying to coax supernatural evidence out of their victim. Lucie’s campaign of vengeance (abuse-revenge rather than rape-revenge) is punctuated by visions of a tortured girl rendered almost demonic by her determination to attack Lucie. We are left wondering, at this stage at least, whether Lucie is undergoing a pure hallucination: the gravity of the attacks on her push the idea of this being ‘all in her head’ about as far as they could conceivably go. In this respect, Martyrs seems to draw together a lot of the quite disparate threads which were drifting along together in horror cinema at the time, and it does so in a way which is quite unique and challenging.
Similarly, the world we continue to occupy is all too ready to grant us protracted violence and dismal conclusions, with our own spectres ready to rise up and greet us. Dig just a little, and you can find footage of human beings still being burned alive or executed for some thinly hopeful spiritual reason or transgression; if Martyrs’ most appalling scenes once seemed too extreme or absurd, then do they now, under a continued torrent of evidence which we have to work to avoid, rather than seek out? Any internet search does it. And, as our population ages (it’s notable that so many of the seekers in Martyrs are elderly) we are going to be brought up against the all-but-certain nothingness at the end of it all. As for networks of people tormenting and abusing children – well, it’s notable that the word ‘historic’ has now undergone a kind of pejoration, so often have we heard it in its new guise; it’s now often wedded to cases of organised child abuse going back decades, happening just beneath the surface of the everyday. In effect, life can be wonderful, but for so many it can be a bleak and thankless existence, and the film encapsulates perfectly that compulsion to find purpose, by whatever horrible means. I don’t mean to be trite here: Martyrs is, after all, just a film, but perhaps it has taken root because of the way it cast about for unpalatable elements in the real world and condensed them into a startling and – whatever your take on it – unforgettable horror movie.