The Fantasia International Film Festival is a genuine delight and a highlight in the Warped Perspective year; its organisers definitely have the gift when it comes to selecting intrepid cinema from around the world. If anything, it can be a little intimidating to scroll through the selections: there’s enough there to keep a film fan going until the following year, and still get FOMO. Yeah, I said ‘FOMO’. But to make up for that, I’ve also taken a good look at the upcoming titles, and here are a few which look particularly interesting to the kinds of genre film fans who tend to pop in around here. (We may be covering some of these; we may be covering other titles; whatever transpires, we will be working hard to cover as many Fantasia titles as humanly possible from the end of July onwards, basically until we’re forced to step away.)
Booger
Director Mary Dauterman has showcased one of her short films at Fantasia previously, and now is back with her very first feature-length. In Booger, Anna (Grace Glowicki) is dealing with a horrible array of crises as she tries to deal with the death of her close friend Izzy, all whilst life refuses to stop ticking along: her landlord troubles her constantly for rent. When she gets bitten by Izzy’s cat Booger one day, things take an unexpected turn when she…thereafter starts craving canned fish, swallowing hairballs and – in a less cutesy move – starts to feel some decidedly predatorial instincts…Fantasia has the world premiere coming up.
Pandemonium
Please excuse me as I go into cut/paste mode, but short of saying that director Quarxx’s new feature sounds very intriguing, I simply can’t say enough with confidence about the film to explain its premise. Therefore, check this out: Drawing on themes found in Dante’s Inferno and Milton’s Paradise Lost, the film is a multi-textured existential fantasy topped with signature notes of visceral horror, disturbing fairy tale, wry comedy, and thrills. Exploring the many faces of death — suicide, murder, illness, accident — Quarxx dives deep into the notion of sin without redemption and the frailty of the human condition through the waking nightmare of one confused traveler (Hugo Dillon) who refuses to abandon all hope as he enters the gates of hell.
Home Invasion
A genre of film in its own right, the premise of ‘home invasion’ fascinates and terrifies film fans; whilst many films contain elements of home invasion, i.e. they examine the unsettling impact of finding that your space is not fully safe, home invasion explores more fully the premise that your home can be forcibly broken into, your lives violated. Home Invasion, Graeme Arnfield’s blend of experimental film and documentary, charts the intermingling of fear, invasion and technology, from the first doorbell to Amazon Ring; the more ways we find to define the limits of outside vs. inside, the more ways we have imagined those limits being broken down.
Birth/Rebirth
The ghastly interplay between life and death sometimes give us films which explore them fully at their limits – Wake Wood (2009) questioned the limits of death, and asked what would be admissible to bring back a much-loved child; the likes of Grace (2009) blends birth, death and vitality via a blood-drinking newborn; Birth/Rebirth takes it a step further, as a single mother and a childless morgue technician (Judy Reyes, Marin Ireland) bond over a little girl they have reanimated from the dead. Like Grace, to keep the child alive necessitates some grotesque decisions and materials; what price this new life? Director Laura Moss invites us to explore the issues in this very modern retelling of that classic blend of Gothicism and science – Frankenstein.
Closing film: We Are Zombies
The team behind the stellar Summer of ’84 (2018) – RKSS – are back to ponder a world where zombies aren’t the continual threat we’d suppose them to be. We’ve been building towards this for some time, really, from the criminally underrated Fido (2006) to the end reels of Land of the Dead (2005) through to Zombie For Sale (2019). So we’re more than ready for We Are Zombies, where the zombies themselves – or the ‘living impaired’ as they’re now known – can wander freely, and have no urge to eat flesh, brains or anything else. But – as the above teaser image reveals – that’s not all there is to it, and we can expect plenty of RKSS’s signature flair and humour: after all, creatures who have no lives to worry about, as such, are not easy companions to live with, even if they mean new opportunities for the living.
Other titles to look out for:
Tiger Stripes (a monstrous coming-of-age story set in rural, religiously-observant Malaysia), Apocalypse Clown (it’s high time circus clowns get a post-apocalyptic story arc), Fantastic Golem Affairs (nothing has lost in translation there; it’s all about a friend who turns out to have been a golem – well, possibly), Eight Eyes (Vinegar Syndrome’s shock Serbia-set roadtrip horror) and of course, a special career achievement award for Nicolas Cage, a mainstay of both genre and mainstream titles for forty years and an actor who always brings his own centre of gravity to everything he does.
Watch this space for more, coming very soon…