Keri O'Shea

DVD Review: The Bloody Judge (1970)

Posted on January 7, 2013 by Keri O'Shea

Review by Keri O’Shea

Jess Franco was (and is) ready to turn his hand to just about anything, so it should come as little surprise to find that he did, back in 1970, make a film all about the turbulent history of 17th Century Britain. In many ways, The Bloody Judge is rather an anomalous Franco film: it evidently has a budget, for one thing, the locations, sets and costumes are generally really good and it’s…linear, never devolving into the soft-focus confusion which, well, I rather like, but doesn’t usually do much for the plot. That said, the Hand of Jess is still at play here. Once you’ve seen the lovely Maria Rohm engaged in some frankly unorthodox lady torture, you’ll know you’re home. If anything, the slight schizophrenia at the heart of the film which sees it trying to be both a historical epic and a panoply of buxom wenches weakens its impact overall, but unusually, we get to hear from Franco (and star Christopher Lee) in a documentary included in the extras, and it makes the reasons for this a lot clearer.

The film takes place in the year 1685, the time of the so-called ‘Bloody Assizes’ here in this green and pleasant land: the king, James II, was at risk of being overthrown by the Duke of Monmouth and his supporters, and so he meted out very tough justice against any known or suspected Monmouth sympathisers via the Assize Courts and, in particular, one Judge Jeffreys, played here with customary gravitas by Christopher Lee. Jeffreys was renowned for his loyalty to the Crown and his readiness to hang traitors. In this version of the story, he also has to deal with prisoners accused of witchcraft. A young woman called Alicia Grey (Margaret Lee) is brought before him on this charge, so he orders a ‘thorough examination’ (carried out by Franco regular Howard Vernon, in possibly the world’s largest belt) which determines her guilt, natch. Alicia’s sister Mary (Rohm) petitions for her release, but it’s no good: Jeffreys will not be moved. However, their paths are destined to cross again, when she beings a relationship with the son of a powerful man and throws in her lot with the rebels. Intrigue, violence and vengeance of course ensue.

The success of Witchfinder General, made in 1968, spawned a host of films which hoped to do as well out of similar subject matter and historical settings, and I think it’s fair to say that The Bloody Judge is one of those films. It feels similar in lots of ways: the immoveable and cruel figure doling out torment and execution, the background of political upheaval, and the troubled love affair which links both of these together seem oddly familiar…this isn’t to say that he Bloody Judge is a failure, just that its influences are pretty transparent. It is definitely interesting to see Franco doing a straight film, as well: he may be playing fast and loose with historical accuracy by suggesting that the English ever burned witches, for instance (and he ain’t on his own there) but there’s lots here to commend him. It makes you wonder how differently his career might have panned out if he’d always had access to these kinds of budgets and actors. Maybe his eccentricities have been at least partly born out of sheer necessity when trying to make films on next to no money. Perhaps in a parallel universe somewhere, Stanley Kubrick has gone down in history as a hack and Franco is being revered in Film Studies classes around the globe…

I’ve never seen Christopher Lee turn in a bad performance and he’s as reliable as ever here, really getting into the opportunity to portray a historical figure. His interest in historical accuracy led to some grumbles about some of the inclusions in the film, i.e. the nudity which crept in, but on listening to Franco in the ‘Bloody Jess’ documentary included on the disc, it seems that the bewilderingly pan-European nature of the project may be at least partly to blame for the twists and turns. (It could also be that what we are seeing here is a print comprising of many different prints, some more ‘clothed’ than others. Certainly the film changes to German language at a few points, which suggests a few sources have been used.) According to Franco, every new producer hailing from a different European country who arrived on set put pressure on him to make various inclusions. This is why we go from historical drama, to a bit of soft core, to torture horror, and back to historical drama again, which makes the tone of the film a bit bewildering.

Still, decent performances, decent locations (actually Spain and Portugal) and an interesting historical setting make The Bloody Judge a worthwhile film overall. Rohm and Lee light up the screen when they’re on it, and there’s enough going on to be entertaining.

The Mediumrare Entertainment release comes with extras in the shape of the theatrical trailer, deleted and alternative scenes, chapters, and what was originally a Blue Underground documentary featuring interviews with both Christopher Lee and Jess Franco (who have worked on seven films together). I’d say the documentary is as worthwhile as the film itself, as it’s a pleasure to hear both men describing their experiences on-set, and Franco’s disparagement for the multitude of stupid re-titles his films have been given over the years (The Bloody Judge became Night of the Blood Monster in the US, for pity’s sake) would certainly strike a chord with many of us here at Brutal As Hell, as we’re still seeing a lot of this; it seems not much has changed in the last forty-odd years, eh?

The Bloody Judge will be released by Mediumrare on January 21st, 2013.

DVD Review: Room 237

Posted on January 5, 2013 by Keri O'Shea

By Keri O’Shea

The Shining is a personal favourite of mine, and remains one of the strongest horror films I’ve seen – a film which retains its impact, even after many viewings. It’s safe to say I’m not on my own in that respect, as the presence of the documentary film Room 237 attests. However, straightforward behind-the-scenes documentary this is not. What we have here instead is something of a Da Vinci Code for a horror classic. Proceed with a healthy pinch of salt at hand.

The makers of Room 237 have interviewed five film writers – if you would care to Google them, they are Jay Weidner, John Fell Ryan, Juli Kearns, Geoffrey Cocks and Bill Blakemore – each with certain levels of eccentricity, who each hold certain beliefs about the significance of The Shining, and details which form part of the film. We don’t see them, we only hear them, as they expound their theories over the relevant scenes (and scenes from a host of other films, television and newsreel, including a hell of a lot of shots from Demons because, you know, a cinema.) What I will say for Room 237 is that it strikes out on its own in terms of its format, and carries a certain level of engagement because of this novelty. It has an oddly-distancing vibe, though, this effect of a voice putting forward a theory, over soft music and turned-down scenes from the film. High-octane it ain’t. Where the gentle tone of the film meets its match, though, is in the theories being expounded here.

Did you realise that The Shining is actually all about the ill-treatment of the Native Americans? Or an examination of the Holocaust? Or a treatise on the general evil of, and I quote, “white folk”? You’ll also find out that Stanley Kubrick’s face appears in the clouds during the aerial scene at the start of the film, and that Kubrick himself was essentially a seer who knew everything about humanity, because The Shining has something to say about, and again I quote, “everything that exists”. Oh, fuck, I forgot that it’s also a template for the faked moon landings. I find myself genuinely at a loss as to whether the filmmakers are teasing us, or teasing their interviewees, but I will say this: I found myself howling with laughter in places, though never feeling quite sure if I was supposed to be laughing. But then again – why not re-record the audio on one of the sections where a young child interrupts his dad’s discussion? Is that because money was tight, or out of a sense of wickedness? The jury’s out on that one.

The head-scratching moments here are many. There are, to be sure, some genuinely interesting examples of mirroring and similarities, particularly between The Shining and other Kubrick films, and the commentators drew my attention to little visual tics which I had not noticed before, even during all of the times I’ve seen the film. At some points, there’s also evidence that at least some of these visual tics were put there intentionally by Kubrick. However, ultimately this slow-mo po-mo documentary works on the po-mo premise that, even if the author of a creative work did not mean to say something, theorists can prove they said it anyway. After years of seeing my favourite novels reclaimed and dissected by queer theorists and radical feminism, to name but two of the worst culprits, I have acutely limited patience with this approach. What I can say for sure about Room 237 is that it’s introduced me to a group of people who plain do not watch films in the same way as me, or most of us.

More than that, in places I felt like I was being made privy to a complex, cogent but warped version of reality as built up by someone delusional. The level of extrapolation which followed from noticing Danny had the number 42 on his shirt sleeve, for instance, led on to a slightly worrying fanaticism with tracing the number in different places through the film and then showing that this related to 1942 and thus to the Holocaust. The problem is that so much of this stuff can be knocked down as easily as it’s built up: it all depends on a tremendous narrowness of vision, noticing the things which suit you in huge detail but overlooking hundreds of other details which might compromise what you think. Also – and I’m no theorist, to be sure, but – if something’s subliminal, how in the hell do you know it’s there?

Essentially then, Room 237 is an at-times intriguing piece of film, though as much for its window into the mind of a certain type of film analyst as for anything else it does. It at least goes to show that The Shining continues to exert a massive hold over its admirers. Still, you have to wonder how people can be willing to read so much into the film, and yet be completely unwilling to accept it’s a horror movie…

Room 237 will be released by Metrodome on February 11th 2013.

UPDATE: The release date has now been changed to 11th March.

A Year in Horror – Keri’s Take on 2012

Posted on December 31, 2012 by Keri O'Shea

By Keri O’Shea

So long then, 2012. As we come to the end of another year, a few of us here at Brutal As Hell have already taken time out to reflect on the year in genre film. If you haven’t already done so, check out Nia’s end-of-year review here and Ben’s low-down on the good, the bad and the ugly here. One thing is apparent from reading through both of my co-writers’ articles, though, and that’s what a hectic year it’s been for film fans. All in all, it’s been a bloody good year too. Whilst I wasn’t able to get out to as many festivals as I’d have hoped and thus sadly missed out on a lot of the most hotly-debated films of the year while they were being hotly-debated, much of that which I have seen has given me hope that indie cinema in particular still has the ideas and still has the enthusiasm – it’s not all found footage and sexual assault after all. Hallelujah. Still, as with any year, you’re never going to be pleased all the time. In fact, sometimes, you’re going to be downright appalled, bored or pissed off. Such is the gamut of emotions we get as film fans, which is why I’m going to approach my own review of the year from the perspective of some of those emotional states – positive and negative – which I’ve been through in 2012. This will mean at times I discuss elements of the plot which could contain mild spoilers. So, without further ado…

Most enthralling – The Cabin in the Woods

This is a film I simply did not expect to like. Although, by some miracle considering I am an internet user, I managed to go into the screening of The Cabin in the Woods without really knowing anything about what I was about to see, I had heard one slightly ominous prefix being bandied around, and that prefix was ‘meta-‘. If ever a small word could fill you with dread…I had a horrible feeling I was about to see another Scream, a film which wrongly thought it could look down its nose at the horror genre from a vantage point of smug superiority. I wondered if Joss Whedon was going to attempt to do the same thing. In actuality, The Cabin in the Woods showed that you can be genre-aware and self-referential without ever coming across as sneering, and crafted an original story out of a whole host of recognisable elements. Loaded with fine detail, but working perfectly as an overarching story, this film had me hooked. If you’ve been living under a rock and haven’t seen it yet, I recommend it. You can also check out Britt Hayes’ review here and Steph’s rather-less glowing review here. Hey, let it never be said that we all sing from the same hymn sheet here…

Most confusing – Prometheus

Regardless of whether a film is set in space, or on another planet, or has robots, or monsters, or any combination of same, it should still have a convincing internal logic. It needn’t answer every question it raises, of course not, but you still want to believe that the writers themselves could answer them – that there exists some cogency somewhere in the proceedings. Prometheus, whether by a process of re-writes or by sheer oversight, has so many plot holes that all of its many dazzling features were laid completely flat for me. Now, I hear that there’s another film on the way, and perhaps this film will help to clear up some of the questions raised in Prometheus, but it will not be able to fix everything. Personally, I could have taken less of the glorious alien vistas and a bit more of a workable narrative: I just wasn’t suitably blinded by science fiction, and came out of the cinema with an array of questions which I really don’t think anyone involved with the film could answer. If you don’t mind the spoilers, this discussion of the film is essentially all of the things I wanted to know, too.

Most convincing – Antiviral

My film of the year (check out my full-length review here), Antiviral is a massively impressive début feature from Brandon Cronenberg, bringing us a world made eerie by its toxic familiarity. To create this effective and chilling horror story, all Cronenberg has had to do is create a vision of celebrity culture which is, perhaps, just one notch up on what we currently have. The notion of ‘biological communion’ with the stars and the sickness which pervades through the film literally as well as figuratively makes this a grim, depressing but ultimately engaging watch, and its closing line of dialogue is unsurpassed this year. If this is the level of expertise we can expect from Brandon Cronenberg than I would not be at all surprised if he becomes one of my favourite working directors. Let’s hope we see more from him soon, and that this brilliant film gets seen by enough people.

Most irritating – American Mary

Why yes, not only do we not sing from the same hymn sheet at this site, we have at times thought of changing the site name from Brutal As Hell to Contrary As Fuck. Being completely honest though, ‘irritation’ is the emotion I chiefly associate with American Mary at this stage, as much for the levels of adoration being expressed everywhere towards the film and its directors (which wouldn’t go amiss in the dystopian world of Antiviral) as for the film’s own flaws. The more I’ve thought about these flaws, the more disappointed I am that so few fans and/or reviewers have discussed them at all. Whilst I can see some value in American (or rather Hungarian-Canadian) Mary, I simply cannot get past its huge hurdles: the sheer inconceivability of the student-teacher relationship, the speed date rape, the clumsy use of rape as a plot device full stop, the wilful or otherwise misunderstanding of the subject matter and its ‘shock value’, but most of all, that protracted and egotistical Soskas cameo. Someone needed to say that no, appearing in the film for such a long period of time to no plot purpose would not be ‘rad’, it would derail any momentum and believability which the film might have built up – such as how it had attempted to humanise people in the body modification scene and then, for instance, shows one of the people who supposedly belong to this culture attacking and biting a dancer. So much for consenting adults, eh?

Most mind-blowing – Bobby Yeah

Bobby Yeah is an experience that I cannot liken to anything else. Using the medium of stop-motion animation is a smart move for filmmakers who want to bring their peculiarly batshit insane vision to audiences, and director Robert Morgan has let his imagination run absolute riot in this unique short film. What’s it about? Bloody hell, it’s not easy to explain. Essentially, a little ne’er-do-well can’t resist literally pressing buttons. And, when he does, his curiosity is rewarded with a series of run-ins with increasingly weird creatures. To be honest, this film was one of those foremost in my mind when we decided to really resurrect the Horror in Short section here on the site, because it is absolutely criminal that a film of this calibre should not be more widely seen. Fans of the surreal should track it down, and then do what is the almost inevitable next step – get someone else to see it. It’s like the video tape in Ring only without the ill-effects, as long as you’re not in a mentally-altered state when you see it of course…

Most disappointing – The Innkeepers

As a proviso, I am horribly, horribly picky about supernatural horror. Where I can forgive or at least overlook flaws in other horror genres, provided I think the intentions are earnest, when it comes to good old-fashioned ghost stories I immediately turn into Statler and Waldorf. This is only because I love a good scare so much. Promise me this and fail to live up to it, and I take great umbrage. Promise me a ghost story, then weigh me down with irritating characters (Claire was beyond punchable), acres of inane conversation and a weak script, and I will lose interest long before any of the interesting attempts at fright occur. Throwing clichés in there for good measure, like the contrived appearance of the female ghost? Please don’t. I had similar problems with Sinister: for me, when up against dross like the Paranormal Activity movies, good supernatural horror needs to be great. It needs to show the world how it’s done. For me, The Innkeepers just didn’t. So, so frustrating.

Most amusing – John Dies At The End

If anyone could bring the hilarious, complex world of David Wong’s novel of the same name to the screen then it’s Don Coscarelli. We know he has form: one of his best and best-loved films, Bubba Ho Tep, owes its inception to the writing of Joe R. Lansdale, an author who has a fair few things in common with Wong, not least the mordant and savvy way he writes about strange things happening to ordinary guys. Well, John and David are definitely ordinary guys and strange things are definitely happening to them…it’s all linked to this mind-altering, dimension-scrambling drug they encounter, see. They call it ‘the sauce’, and it means things will never be the same again. I adored the novel, but I was anxious about how its multi-layered wit and complex subject matter would work in a movie. I needn’t have worried: it works brilliantly, and better still, it’s just as funny as I’d hoped it would be. John and David deserve to take their place amongst the best slacker heroes cinema has to offer, and this is a film which deserves a cult following, not least because it’s entirely in earnest and doesn’t seem to have set out to get one. But don’t just take my word for it – have a look at Ben’s glowing review here.

Most disturbing – Resolution

I hope that my full review here will adequately explain just why Resolution was so effective and innovative. It’s rare that a film can move so easily from what seems at first to be a comedic premise to something altogether more sinister, and so the fact that it does shows great skill on behalf of the writers/directors and the actors involved. To put it another way; it’s very unusual that I can bear with a film which incorporates ‘found footage’, so overused and tedious has this motif become. Resolution not only uses it as an interesting framework rather than a cost-effective cop-out, but makes it absolutely integral to the plot and – get this – makes it scary again. The more I’ve thought about the film’s ending over the past few months – an ending which I wasn’t wholly satisfied with at the time – the more I can accept it as a deft, still-questioning moment of anxious closure. Definitely one of the high points of the cinematic calendar, it’s a film which has made its mark on me, and I really hope it gets the attention it rightly deserves.

DVD Review: Midnight Son (2011)

Posted on December 23, 2012 by Keri O'Shea

By Keri O’Shea

Jacob is twenty-four years old, works the night shift as a security guard and – he’s sickening for something. He seems bemused by the physical symptoms which are laying him so low; he has a skin condition, he says, but he eats well and yet his doctor tells him he’s malnutritioned. Perhaps his physical symptoms stem from his general alienation from other people, affecting him psychosomatically, making him feel ill at ease. Whatever the cause, when he seeks to break out of his isolated existence by reaching out to a similarly disaffected soul by the name of Mary, he’s forced to confront his condition as his relationship with her grows. But what is his condition? Mary jokingly asks him if he’s a vampire. Well…maybe. At the very least, as his symptoms start to take him to some very dark places, it becomes increasingly difficult for him to sustain the reality and normality he craves alongside the something else he craves…

Films which explore the humanity of vampires are nothing new; we’ve had, ahem, a very successful uber-franchise in recent years which has taken most of the vampirism out of vampirism for the purposes of examining the relationships at the core of the story. Well, Midnight Son – with all due apologies for making the comparison I just did – shows that vampires can be both monstrous and inexplicable as well as essentially humane. This isn’t a bloodless movie thankfully, however the blood-craving itself is approached obliquely. What we don’t get in this film is any epic back-story about how Jacob came to be what he is, usually inevitably going back to the days of ruffled collars and velvet: in fact, Jacob doesn’t really seem to know what he is, or how he came to be that way. In a nice self-referential moment, we see him going to his local video rental store to check out some vampire movies, before attempting some of what he sees in the bathroom mirror (and what do you know? Crucifixes don’t work). Perhaps a fairer comparison for Midnight Son would be to Romero’s Martin, another film with a sympathetic male protagonist whose condition is ambiguous, even more so than Jacob in fact. But, the sense of lack of clarity regarding the vampirism-or-not allows us to develop a strong interest in the predicaments of the characters facing this issue.

Ambiguity is one of the film’s key strengths, then. But how it works is by framing the other key strength of the film, namely the developing relationship between Jacob and Mary, played by Zak Kilberg and Maya Parish respectively. Zak Kilberg certainly carries off the ‘elegantly wasted’ aesthetic nicely, looking both believably ill and interestingly frail throughout, where Mary’s coke-snorting habit lends a hard edge to her beauty which makes her just as appealing to watch. Together, as they go through the earliest stages of their relationship they’re awkward as hell and thus believable, not to mention rather sweet. I enjoyed seeing how earnestly they seemed to want to get along, and how their natural-seeming conversations ran. Their (significantly) always-abortive attempts to sleep together also permit an original if low-key twist, bringing a revelatory moment for Jacob, and this moves the film’s plot on nicely. Everything here is slow-burn though, and moves along at a dreamlike pace. Just as Jacob is ill and detached from things happening around him, so I felt as a viewer, albeit with a sense of dread, as the movie coolly escalates towards its end point.

…which I expected to be a moment of catastrophe. It wasn’t, and I thought it all concluded in a satisfactorily bittersweet way.

My major bone of contention with a movie I otherwise found very effective was the effect of introducing a certain set of characters who, whilst adding an element of risk to the film which it definitely needed so that it could conclude, felt rather unbelievable and unpolished in comparison to Jacob and Mary, as did the plot line which initially brings Jacob into contact with Marcus. I liked where it went, but certainly not where it started. That said, as a fucked up love story with some engaging sinister touches, I think Midnight Son is a success; it’s an interesting development upon a theme which you might be forgiven for thinking has been done to death.

The UK DVD release by Monster Pictures comes with a host of extras, including interviews with the cast, music featured in the film, deleted scenes and the theatrical trailer.

Midnight Son will be released in the UK on February 13th, 2013, from Monster Pictures.

Horror in Short Review: Nicky (2012)

Posted on December 16, 2012 by Keri O'Shea

By Keri O’Shea

As feature length movies grow increasingly longer, short films serve a purpose beyond themselves – and that is to remind the film-going world that a moving story can be told in a fraction of the time which many features feel they now need. This is the case with Nicky, the third film by director/writer Dom Portalla, whose own feature The Darkness Within was reviewed by Marc last year. In common with The Darkness Within, Nicky focuses on the psychological rather than the visceral, but the story at its core is no less disturbing. The film explores the enormity of personal tragedy, and the fact that Nicky focuses on the impact which this tragedy has on an individual makes it far more harrowing than even the nastiest horror could hope to express.

Our nameless lead character and narrator (played by Ken Flott) is a man living with the fallout from the disappearance of his little brother – the Nicky of the title – many years before. The unresolved sense of loss has cast a shadow over his life ever since, trapping him in a kind of stasis, unable to move on. He refuses invitations to socialise, two marriages have failed – and all the time, just out of his line of vision or when he’s between sleeping and waking, he sees Nicky, just as he was on the day of his disappearance. It’s clear that our lead has to do something, or something has to happen. His life is half-lived, and he can’t go on in this manner. So, when he finds out about something which could help him to find out what did happen to his brother, he takes the opportunity to try and get the closure he needs…

This is a strong effort from Portalla – who realises that it’s possible to balance tension with pathos when you get your focus right. Key here is the performance of Ken Flott, who developed the idea for the story and also collaborated on the screenplay; Nicky is in many ways a character study of our narrator, and he is kept in very close focus throughout, albeit at times obliquely. Flott’s character often appears in profile, for instance, which gives the impression that his state of mind is hidden and adds to the feeling of distance between him and the other characters he encounters. He’s present, but he’s also absent. The fact that he isn’t named is important here too, especially as someone else’s name hangs so heavily over the story; his own identity has been lost, as he tries to find out what happened to another person. His plight isn’t over-expressed, but yet we get a surprisingly complex character, someone whose inner life you can believe in.

As to if and when the narrator finds the answers he seeks, the pace of reveal here is effective and engaging, and it kept me guessing throughout. Coming in at just under thirty minutes, it’s testament to the film’s writing that it made such good use of the timescale it had, utilising ambitious editing and a script which manages to be sardonic in places, and genuinely moving in others. That said, there were a couple of moments where a brand of surreal, almost black comedy crept in, and I wasn’t so sure that this fitted with the general vibe of the film. Sure, it aided the distancing effect present throughout the film, but it did jar a little with me. It was the simply-expressed emotion which I thought made up the stronger aspect of the script: the line “they unfortunately live forever” summed up so much about what is at the heart of this film – the rawness of grief. In fact, the brief nod to horror which is present in the resolution – however necessary it is to the plot – is where the film is at its weakest, because here it is most easily-linked to horror tropes it exceeds elsewhere. As a psychological study with darkness at its heart however, it is a superb short film.

Here’s a sneak preview of Nicky, which is currently on the festival circuit.

And look out for an interview with director Dom Portalla in the near future here at Brutal As Hell…

“The Bastards Have Landed!” 25 Years of Bad Taste

Posted on December 11, 2012 by Keri O'Shea

By Keri O’Shea

Alien invasions have taken many forms in film over the years; we’ve had bug-eyed Martians, super-intelligent hunters, sentient gloop, sentient gloop which becomes mass-marketed as a tasty snack, and many new arrivals – be they plant life or meteor-borne slugs, for instance – who have sought to take over the bodies of humans in as convincing a way as possible, to avoid detection for as long as possible. That isn’t quite how it goes in Bad Taste, the first feature-length movie from director Peter Jackson…

Aliens have landed in a sleepy small town in New Zealand, and so conspicuous are the boss-eyed, shambling xenomorphs who seem to have replaced the townsfolk there that, whether or not they’re clad inconspicuously in standard-issue blue denim, they’ve come to the attention of the government. Oh, that and the fact that all the usual inhabitants are still missing. That’s a whopping seventy-five people! Obviously, something has to be done about this. We’re made privy, at the start of the film, to the governmental decision-making on what to do about these “intergalactic wankers” and the powers-that-be are evidently deadly serious. That’s why they’re sending The Boys – otherwise known as the Astro Investigation and Defence Service. Yep, it’s a mnemonic to conjure with, and a crew to be feared. Sort of…

Meet Derek, Barry, Ozzy and Frank: they’re hardly the crack paramilitary team you might expect. Derek (played by Jackson himself) is a batty scientist who keeps birds; as for his colleagues, the kindest thing we could say about them is that they’re a band of likeable pillocks, bemused by their own incompetence a lot of the time, and the type of blokes you’d be shy of trusting with a shopping list, let alone saving the planet. The vicar who joins them, when he picks the wrong day to go door-to-door collecting for charity, isn’t a whole lot better. There’s something truly gleeful about watching this lot try to cope with the situation unfolding around them; it’s at the heart of Bad Taste’s slacker wit, that which has been imitated but never fully replicated elsewhere, because the New Zealand of the film’s setting is completely unique. The Kiwis I know insist that provincial NZ always feels like it’s a square twenty years behind the rest of the world; you see evidence of that in Bad Taste, where the slow pace of life has evidently passed on to its protagonists, come what may – and you’d think there’d be a bit more of a sense of alarm here than there is. Our AIDS guys deal with the potential end of life as we know it with very relaxed attitudes generally; in America, these guys would be self-consciously written as stoners or they’d be at the other end of the spectrum, action heroes; here, they’re neither of those things, they’re just achingly funny regular blokes doing their best, but occasionally sitting around and reading magazines while they wait to see what’ll happen. Course, these are still professionals: they can get it together when they really need to – and when they do, it often leads to copious gore.

If its sense of humour is a fundamental part of the film’s long-lasting charm, then the zany special effects in Bad Taste are a huge part of that – in fact, you really can’t divorce the two. From the outset, the blood and guts are totally over-the-top and absurd; we’re barely past the opening credits when we’ve seen an alien getting his head blown clean off, in a sequence which has aged pretty well and has in all likelihood influenced much later films, like Inbred, which uses a very similar scene. To quote Derek, “I pity the poor bastard that’s got to clean that up.” Bad Taste features gallons of the red stuff, limb removals, literal human(oid) shields, and brains which look a hell of a lot like blancmange – it’s all pretty full on, and more that, it’s seriously icky. The alien who loses the top of his head? Observe his buddy later eating the contents of his skull with a spoon. The film has a really infamous moment of ick, too: ask anyone what they remember most clearly from this film and I bet they’ll say ‘the gruel scene’: I re-watched the film before writing this feature, and the vision of one of the aliens vomiting blue liquid into a bowl which his cohorts then drink still makes me wince/laugh/wince, absolutely in that order. You can see the steam rising off it, for fuck’s sake! So, the grue definitely lends itself to giggles – such as pratfalls which crack heads open (and lead to novel uses for a belt) and human battering rams. Bad Taste gives us a uniquely daft brand of splatstick, and rather than body-horror, what we really have here is body-comedy. And it’s human bodies that figure highly on the agenda of the “extra-terrestrial low lifers” that have landed in Kaihoro. The crux of the plot – that these aliens are part of an intergalactic fast food company and they want to push homo sapiens as the hottest new meat on the menu – is a fun facet to the overall farce.

Considering how well the jokes land here, it’s astonishing really that this is a film that had no formal script: one of the reasons for this is that Peter Jackson – that’s the director, editor, photographer, writer, SFX guy and star, no less – took four years (and nearly exclusively his own cash) to get the film made, and so decided what he was going to shoot as he and his friends went along. It works remarkably bloody well; originally planned to be a short, Bad Taste ended up being the (demented) calling-card of a filmmaker who would go on to rather different fare, but not before he’d exercised his imagination on a couple more unselfconsciously wacky movies: Meet The Feebles (with the world’s first hippopotamus to pack lead, surely) appeared two years after Bad Taste, and then of course Jackson made a film that needs no introduction – the classic Braindead (or Dead Alive for US audiences), which is still probably the goriest film I’ve ever seen and one of the most stand-out zombie horror-comedies ever made.

After Jackson had impressed the New Zealand Film Commission with what he’d shot of Bad Taste when he was approaching the end of the project, finally securing finance to get the film finished, it’s fair to say Jackson’s career hasn’t been so much an arc as a vertical line, at least in terms of locations, commercial viability and of course, budgets (not to mention film length). It’s hard to believe that the same filmmaker who was drop-kicking human heads in Bad Taste could go on to an epic project like the Lord of the Rings trilogy, and I’m sure Jackson himself looks at his filmography and scratches his head from time to time, but there’s a demented energy to his earliest films (and certainly his forays into horror/sci-fi) which means they definitely retain their charm. The grim determination it took Jackson to get his first feature done is a testament to the radically-different works which would follow, too, as it showed someone who was totally committed to the craft, and would do it their own way, whether the vision be of brains leaking out of the back of someone’s head or something a tad more sophisticated, y’know, like Mordor…

Wherever you stand on Jackson’s later films, there’s still so much to love about the imaginative, spontaneous approach Jackson was taking at the beginning of his career; apart from the fact that, for good or ill, the appearance of this lo-fi project probably inspired countless filmmakers to just get out there and make their own damn movie, Bad Taste remains a seriously entertaining cult classic, beloved by fans. Razor sharp, eye-poppingly grisly and laugh-out-loud funny, there’s nothing quite like it out there – there wasn’t before it, and there hasn’t been since. And who knows? It’s always open for a follow-up, if Mr. Jackson tires of his glittering Hollywood career and wants to swap back dazzling CGI for rubber masks. Until such time as that eventuality though, happy 25th birthday, Bad Taste! And let us all remember, as if we could ever forget the fact, that Dereks Don’t Run.

A Year in Horror – Themes in the Movies of 2012

Posted on December 9, 2012 by Keri O'Shea

By Keri O’Shea

In many ways, horror can be seen as a distorting mirror, held up to the society to which it belongs in order to focus attention on certain aspects of that society. It renders that which it reflects disproportionate, grotesque or monstrous – and so one of horror’s greatest strengths is that it encourages us to look – in a tongue-in-cheek way or otherwise – at our deepest, darkest concerns, whilst allowing us to pore over these morbid fascinations of ours in a safe space. You can tell a great deal about a place or a time by looking at its monsters: just as Frankenstein’s nameless Creature was a (literal) amalgamation of the concerns of the author’s day, so horror cinema now can reflect our fears and concerns. Ever wondered why zombies suddenly started to run, becoming robust agents of disease as opposed to the mindless, shambling creatures we had known? Perhaps horror was reflecting that, for a while there, the fear of pandemic and illness was more of a concern to us than consumerism or the vacant proletariat, or any of the old preoccupations associated with the walking dead.

So, what can we say about 2012? Well, a lot of what we’ve seen on our screens follows on from years previous – we still have our zombies galore, come to mention them, now both fast and slow; zombies are definitely the stalwart boogeymen of our age, shambling (or hurtling) past the straight-up blood-drinkers, who have been rehabilitated to the point of sparkling farce. Still, the vampire hiatus needn’t be forever, and they do still occasionally pop along to flash a fang on-screen in a way which has the power to appal. It’s certainly possible to identify a few themes running through the horror of 2012 though, and to ponder what it might all be saying about our current state of play. It’s no coincidence that these themes are most noticeable in many of the best films of the year – although, and let me make this clear right here and now, common topics wash up in the detritus of the year as well.

So, without further ado, here are five of the trends I’ve noticed in the films I’ve seen this year. By no means have these themes never been represented in horror before, I might add, but to my mind they have resurfaced in enough movies in 2012 for it to be of interest.

5: The Devil is Alive and Well

…Strange, isn’t it? Or is it? I suppose we can all kid ourselves that we live in the most rational times of all times, but frankly, that’s bullshit. Fundamentalist interpretations of millennia-old religious texts have not gone away, and said texts seem to be invoked more than ever in modern politics, usually to chip-chip away at certain hard-won rights. With people like this in the world who juggle a literal belief in Old Scratch with a mission to override personal autonomy, it’s no wonder that demonic possession has made a lot of headway on screen in 2012, seeing as it combines both of those. The idea of something occult and so powerful that it can erode selfhood hasn’t just popped up in recent American politics; it’s also reared its ugly head in films such as The Devil Inside (a movie so confident in its horror that it didn’t even bother with an ending) and The Possession, and of course there was the obligatory nod to all things demonic in yet another Paranormal Activity movie this year. Utilising a rather more sophisticated spin on the theme, Brit horror The Devil’s Business effectively combined gritty crime fare with arcane goings-on, showing that the Devil is always alive and well in Blighty.

4: Urban Life is Hell

The likes of F and Eden Lake in recent years have clearly shown that the modern, urbane spaces we have created not only aren’t immune to horror, but can generate some specific horrors of their own. So, in the year that many European cities have burned, the notion of an Other on our streets, sentient but sadistic, living by very different rules, has continued to hold certain sway within the genre. Citadel had much in common with F in that its hooded creatures were borderline supernatural in their omnipotence, as well as being just as vicious. Whatever your take on what we at Brutal As Hell have coined ‘chavsploitation’, the fact that we can debate it suggests at least that it’s touching upon certain common nerves and referencing something which we recognise, even if we don’t like its distortions. In The Raid and Dredd 3D, the tower-block dwellers weren’t supernatural, but they were certainly organised and pissed off; both films feature criminal armies in vertical camps, and serve to remind us that sometimes even modern cities can contain foreign countries.

3: It’s All in the Genes

Concerns over what gets dragged up whenever humankind makes significant ‘progress’ is as old as the hills when it comes to the horror genre, but as scientific focus alters, so does its warped reflection. This year, genetics has figured very highly: Errors of the Human Body combined body horror with melodrama as an esteemed doctor tried to get to the heart of the genetic abnormality that killed his son, encountering gung-ho experimentation and the threat of harm along the way which plays with the suspicions held by many about just what goes on in these sterile, efficient but possibly dangerous laboratory spaces. In Prometheus, wormhole-sized plot issues aside, we’re taken to a variant on the Alien universe where it transpires that the whole human race was genetically-engineered, and the robot David treats the crew like guinea pigs, deliberately toying with their DNA for his own and his employer’s own sinister curiosity.

Childlike fascination with the potential of science and especially genetics has given us a fair amount of childish humour, too. SyFy continue to bolt together various unlikely critters with the same pointless enthusiasm as an acid-head in a Lego box, surely pushing the tolerance of even the most committed creature feature fans. It all makes Piranha 3DD seem sane. However, it’s not all lowest common denominator stuff: Japanese movie Dead Sushi brought malevolent modified snacks to the screen, and made it all batshit crazy enough to work…

2: You may feel a little sting…

Following on from the last theme somewhat, 2012 has definitely been the year of the scalpel. Surgery, for many people living in the 21st Century, is so much more than a procedure undertaken to remove this or to fix that for health reasons: plastic surgery is commonplace, and more often than not it’s driven by purely aesthetic decision-making. But it’s still surgery: you still have to put yourself into the hands of another individual, and trust that what they do to you when you’re not even breathing for yourself is what you want or need. It’s little wonder that this crops up as a theme in horror cinema then, and this year surgery has formed the bedrock of two much-debated, contentious indie movies. American Mary has been a real cause célèbre throughout the year, dividing opinion pretty squarely between those who consider it flawless body horror and those who think it’s the Emperor’s New Clothes. Regardless, its subject matter – of a damaged young medical student offering surreptitious body modifications in order to support herself – finds some echoes in Excision, another film in which surgery is key, and another example of a damaged individual whose medical aspirations turn problematic. Hand over your bodies to these individuals at your peril, perhaps. Or, indeed, you could hand over your body to an individual like Syd Marsh…

Antiviral, my favourite film of the year, masterfully extends a facet of modern life we’d all recognise and takes it into grotesque, medicalised territory. In its world, obsessive celebrity fans can enjoy ‘biological communion’ with their favourite stars, paying a handsome sum in order to be deliberately infected with the stars’ viruses. It’s designer contagion, and the Lucas Corporation trades well in it. Loneliness mingles with sickness in Antiviral, and it’s all packaged in worryingly plausible terms, just one degree of separation from our world. That’s what makes it so unsettling, and so very timely.

1: Technology is Terror

The ongoing, exasperating prevalence of ‘found footage’ movies within the horror genre points to one thing, if it does nothing else: technology is everywhere, even in the hands of those who you’d suppose would struggle with shoelaces. Technological advancement is, then, no barrier to horror; rather, horror creeps very comfortably into technology, adapting to it and colonising it. For me, the Japanese horror movies which first broke into the Western market in the mid- to late-Nineties were ground-breaking in this respect. Ring and The Grudge showed us that ghosts and demons were happy to upgrade, inhabiting CCTV, mobile phones and much more. Interestingly, we’ve had a few films this year which went rather retro in their use of technology as a plot motif, going back to the sinister video tape idea so important to Ring (V/H/S) or even back beyond that, to the 1970s and to the horror inherent in devising a contemporary movie soundtrack (Berberian Sound Studio).

We’ve seen much more up-to-date gadgetry at use in the genre this year too, though: Sinister made a creepy game out of the DVDs which told the tale, and the enjoyable Resolution combined the lot, running through obsolete recording equipment right through to new model laptops. The point which Resolution reiterates is that dark forces are always with us, adapting to whatever medium they require. Whatever’s cutting edge can have a cutting edge, if needs be. And, of course, The Cabin in the Woods took the notion of old evil refracted through modern trappings to its zenith, in one of the most enjoyable and original movies of the year. Surveillance culture has never been so successfully married to the horror genre as it has here – and perhaps that is key to why we’re seeing so much horror refracted through so many media. If we’re all watching each other, then maybe the thought of something else watching us watching each other is, as horror tropes go, as present and correct as it is perennial.

Horror in Short – Brutal Relax (2010)

Posted on December 2, 2012 by Keri O'Shea

By Keri O’Shea

Here in the UK, we’re now in the grip of a good old fashioned British winter (with the exception of all the flooding, which is a fairly new development): at the moment, we have to contend with that unique Blighty cold which clings to your bones, frost, snow and high winds. Marvellous. That’s at least one reason why I’m happy to be bringing the world of Brutal Relax to Brutal As Hell – it’s just nice to see the sun, sand and sea, even if this turns out to be a very unorthodox beach break…

The singular Mr. Olivares (José María Angorrilla) is under strict doctor’s orders to stay calm, as we see him leaving the care of some sort of institution: we can guess, even at this stage, that perhaps he has a bit of a temper, so specific is the doc who suggests he should go for a nice vacation somewhere. Anywhere would be fine, just so long as he stays tranquil. So where better than a pleasant, sheltered beach?

Ladies and gentlemen, I bring you Brutal Relax!

The gag here is remarkably simple, but it’s executed with such a sense of fun that it just works brilliantly as a gore-punctuated farce, in the truest sense of the term; that being ‘a light, humorous play in which the plot depends upon a skilfully exploited situation rather than upon the development of character.’ It is light and humorous, which is a wonder when you consider the limbs flying and the ribcages sailing through the air.

That said, there’s a long horror tradition of gory farce. In a few ways, the high-action scenes reminded me of scenes in Braindead (a.k.a Dead Alive), albeit with a dash of CGI here and there which the older film didn’t have; all the same, you look at that body-strewn beach at the end, and you recognise the excess with a wry smile. The action scenes here are a lot of fun as well as being well-handled; deliberately, gleefully cartoonish, with a group of zombie-creatures who, shall we say, can be ‘deconstructed’ in a nice range of increasingly OTT ways as payback for their misdeeds – all while that happy-go-lucky soundtrack trills away in the background. Brutal Relax: in a nutshell, it’s energetic, nicely self-aware and very entertaining.

One final remark I’d make is that, regardless of the tone of the film, using a dead toddler to beat zombies to death with is the mark of a brave filmmaking team…so let’s hope we get to see more of their work in future. Hey, Mr. Olivares could always make a welcome return…

With thanks to the Brutal Relax team.

Good Enough to Eat: 5 of the Best Cannibal Movies

Posted on December 1, 2012 by Keri O'Shea

By Keri O’Shea

Ah, the internet. It’s hard to remember a time when it wasn’t around, helping people to find that special someone whilst simultaneously making it possible to cut right to the chase. Don’t want to spend months of your life concealing your hang-ups and fuck-ups until you get to say what you want to say? Simply find the right website, and you can feel free to unleash your inner self. That’s what a certain gentleman called Armin Meiwes did, and he found just what he wanted…

Armin Meiwes, whose birthday it is today, may have become a vegetarian (!) since being sentenced to eight years’ imprisonment for his actions, but his tastes weren’t always quite so pedestrian. Meiwes – an otherwise unassuming, well-respected citizen of the small town of Rotenberg in Germany – had a dream. That dream was to consume the flesh of a willing human being, and he found just such a person, through a site called The Cannibal Café. Hey, there really is a website for everything. He had placed an ad there looking for a ‘well-built 18 to 30 year old’ who would be willing to be eaten by him; Bernd Jürgen Brandes answered the call, and the rest, as they say, is penis-eating history.

The case generated global fascination and revulsion in equal measure, as it always does when it turns out that cannibalism isn’t necessarily something that happens ‘over there’, well away from the modern, safe, civilised parts of the world: in fact, rare as it might be, it’s always been with us, lurking at the fringes of our consciousness and occasionally making itself known to us. And, although there’s a fine pedigree of exploitation movies which deal with the topic from the point of view of Westerners abroad (and totally screwed), I’m really more interested in movies which play around with this surprisingly versatile topic a little more. Here is my pick of the movies which use cannibalism as a theme in a number of interesting ways, and not a cocky anthropologist film crew in sight. Alles Gute zum Geburtstag, Herr Meiwes.

Meat Grinder (2009)

As Ben noted in his review of the Thai movie Meat Grinder, this is a film which suffered badly at the hands of a misguided marketing campaign: in representing it as a torture-fest, the real story at the heart of this slick, well-made movie was completely overlooked. Sure, Buss (played by the refreshingly ordinary Mai Charoenpura) perpetrates some horrors, but the real horror here is that Buss is living by the old adage, ‘I do unto others what has been done to me’. Her methods are bloody, yes. but as the well-paced film reveals the trauma which drives Buss to her actions, you cannot fail to empathise with her. A combination of necessity and personal trauma drives her on, and as such this is a powerful film which examines abuse and poverty rather than revelling in gore. Don’t be fooled by the cover art; it was chosen by an idiot.

Trouble Every Day (2001)

Is the appetite for sex all that far away from the appetite for flesh? The tagline for Trouble Every Day reads ‘I love you so much, I could eat you’; pull that platitude apart, and there’s something rather odd about conflating love with consumption. Well, director Claire Denis chooses to take it very literally in this blood-soaked, erotic take of science gone awry, warped libidos and damaged individuals. The absolute highlight of this movie is Beatrice Dalle as Coré; she is ‘sick’ with a disease relating to her husband’s research into the human libido. He literally boards her up in their apartment when he isn’t around to keep an eye on her, and why? Well, Coré’s sex drive now means she gets off on eating her partners in flagrante. You have to wait an hour for Dalle’s key scene here, but man, is it intense. I initially felt that this film would have benefited by greater use of Dalle, but actually, what we do get is so jaw-dropping that it’s more than enough.

Soylent Green (1973)

One of the best science fiction movies ever made, Soylent Green explores a future which is close enough and recognisable enough to fill us with unease. Soylent Green is an exploration of the horrors of overpopulation, and what might happen to people when they become expendable – a problem to be rationalised. The cannibalism in the movie is unwitting, a final insult to be heaped upon the citizens by the wealthy Soylent Corporation: the poor are condemned to consume one another. The movie contains one of the most stark, unsettling scenes every to be committed to celluloid: as Sol (Edward G. Robinson, shortly before his own death) signs himself up for voluntary euthanasia, the move between his last moments of happiness and the abrupt efficiency of the production line to which he now belongs is absolutely heart-rending.

Dumplings (2004)

Vanity takes people to some very dark places, but I’m not one of those people who automatically assume that a preoccupation with appearance means the person is necessarily stupid or shallow. There can be a lot at stake, or at least there can feel like there is – as is the case for Mrs. Lee (Miriam Yeung Chin Wah), a woman who, though still attractive, fears losing her looks because she fears losing her husband altogether. She is willing to try anything, and so when she finds out about a woman called Mei and her famous ‘rejuvenating’ dumplings with a special ingredient, she seeks them out. These things work; Mrs. Lee will find out why, and what follows is a plot often blackly comedic, but ultimately sad. The lives of the women portrayed here are desperate, and desperation breeds harmful behaviour. In the pursuit of eternal youth, we already know people will try just about anything.

Of course, the film gained an extra veneer of sinister plausibility when earlier this year, it transpired that Korean customs officials had seized a cargo of Chinese pills filled with powdered human foetuses…

The Mad Butcher (1971)

And speaking of sinister plausibility – ever heard of Fritz Haarmann? We come full circle back to Germany with the last film in my selection, and surely the makers of The Mad Butcher were knowingly referencing the cannibal killer Haarmann, who was thought to have disposed of some of his victims by selling them as ‘pork’ to unsuspecting neighbours. After a spell in an asylum, our main character Otto Lehman (Victor Buono) resumes his old trade as a butcher, but it doesn’t go so well. He accidentally kills his wife, Berta, during an argument, and – not knowing what to do with her – decides to turn her into sausages. Of course people start asking questions about her whereabouts…and they get the same treatment. It’s a film with many flaws, sure, but The Mad Butcher is fun primarily thanks to the enjoyable performance given by Buono, who manages to bring a strange kind of warmth to the role. If you ever thought it’d be impossible to like a man who’d just ground up the missus, well, look no further that The Mad Butcher. Although like Buss in Meat Grinder, he acts out of expediency, two films could not be more different in tone. If anything, The Mad Butcher turns cannibalism into a bit of a chore!

Horror in Short: The Can-Cannibals Double Feature

Posted on November 26, 2012 by Keri O'Shea

By Keri O’Shea

I’ve heard a new term being used recently – on Twitter, as you might expect – and that term relates to the new wave of retro-styled trailers and movies we’ve been seeing so much of lately, those projects which hark back to a seedy, insalubrious, straight-to-video heyday. That term, folks, is ‘rewindhouse’, and yes, I am ashamed of myself for spreading it any further. That said, the fact that someone, somewhere felt the need to coin it at all surely says something; there’s evidently enough of this around now that we can make some generalisations. Perhaps it’s even – eek – a new sub-genre. But there’s very little point in getting wrapped up in that for the moment; what we want to know is, are the films themselves any good?

Well, yeah, they certainly can be. The style allows filmmakers to play around with excess whilst delving into themes and language which just wouldn’t fly in a conventional setting – but, if you care to make it retro, you can get away with murder (and a lot more besides). How much you enjoy this experience depends a) on how much you can keep your tongue in cheek and b) how much you know and enjoy the films which have inspired the new wave of homage. Which brings me onto The Can-Cannibals Double Feature, directed by Matt Ragsdale. This follows in the footsteps of the fake trailers which people seemed to enjoy a hell of a lot more than the Rodriguez/Tarantino Grindhouse back in 2007…

The Can-Cannibals Double Feature (Grindhouse Trailers) from Matthew Ragsdale on Vimeo.

Well, first things first, this is rather different fare to what we’ve been covering in the Horror in Short section over the past few weeks, and as they say – variety is the spice of life. That said, any film which is emulating films with had microscopic budgets with an even more microscopic budget of its own is at risk of certain problems, and this double-feature trailer feels raw even when perhaps it isn’t meant to be – there are some issues with post-production, which you might expect, and this is rather a long trailer, when it might have been snappier if it was shorter.

But, what you do get is a sense of fun from proceedings and of a cast enjoying the experience of filming. Hell, I’d have been happy to see the girls (a real-life burlesque troupe) going even more over-the-top in their performances than they did, and I was happy that they got some good old-fashioned lo-fi gore in there. A grindhouse trailer ain’t complete without some blood and guts. Of the two ‘trailers’, I think Rebelle’s Revenge is the superior one for me: one big reason for this is that Courtney Cipriani as Rebelle brings the right sort of sneering attractiveness to her role. She looks the part and talks the talk, and we get the best lines of the film in this half of the reel.

I’d be lying if I said this was a film without any problems, sure: but the fact that it got made on 200 bucks and a tonne of goodwill shows the type of bloody-mindedness which surely helped bring us the grindhouse material we’re now so often seeing revisited and extolled. With a better budget and armed with more experience, who knows? If it in any way features hot women with scars and guns, you can bet there’ll be a market for it.

With thanks to Matthew Ragsdale

Horror in Short: Séance (2009)

Posted on November 17, 2012 by Keri O'Shea

By Keri O’Shea

The Czech Republic is famous for being the setting of The Golem, which became one of the first horror movies ever filmed – but, excepting the possibility that we’re just not getting to see them, we haven’t seen much horror coming out of that part of Europe. That is, until director Robin Kašpařík – just twenty-three years old at the time of shooting – brought out his superb short film ‘Seance’, which I am delighted to be able to share here at Brutal As Hell. If you’re a fan of supernatural horror, then turn down your lights, turn up your volume, and watch this gem of a short film.

Seance from Robin Kasparik on Vimeo.

It’s refreshing to me to see a movie which is so unashamedly macabre in its appearance and its themes. Realism in horror can be great, sure, but I do love these sorts of stories. Seance has a fairytale aspect, and with none of the darker elements excised. The castle, its inmates and the story of Marie, a young woman who is simultaneously empowered (by her abilities) and disempowered (by the way she is treated by all of the other characters in the story) is pure Gothic fairytale. Power and autonomy are key themes throughout; from the Lovecraft quote which opens the film, to the end scenes, there is a battle for personhood – which plays out in a ghastly, pleasing way.

One of the reasons that the story carries across so effectively because Kašpařík has a strong sense of aesthetics: everything is beautifully shot and lit here, and the opening scenes of the approach to the castle (a real 16th century palace) in particular look fantastic. The performances are very strong, and popular Czech actress Klára Jandová – in effect playing a dual role – does a superb job of communicating the vulnerability of Marie. This is an accomplished piece of work, which weaves a sense of foreboding from the beginning to the end. I’ll always welcome the fact that directors are continuing to make this type of supernatural horror, and this is an excellent example of the genre.

Kašpařík is now in the planning stages of his next short film ‘I Am The Doorway’, based on Stephen King’s ‘body horror’ short story of that name.

Thanks to Robin Kašpařík