Emerging from two years of banishment to virtual space – one full and one partial- Fantasia Film Festival was once again in full flight this summer, luring its hardcore supporters and friends back in droves to the magical dark rooms to quench their withheld cinephilic thirst for experiencing latest offerings of genre cinema in the cheerful company of their confreres. It felt as if those last two draconian years had never come to pass, though the sight of some festival guests and spectators not parting with masks and curious absence of a few friends which turned out to be caused by an untimely infection kept telling us to be appreciative of and savour this opportunity of reconvening for another collective festivity.
There were films which still bore conspicuous traces of this period of crisis in various forms. For instance, Nalsum (Jeon Soeun), a poignant short Korean animation about conformity being imposed on individuals, must have been clearly inspired by enforced masking policies and debates they have been sparking. Here in a fashion comparable to some trending sentiments, the mask becomes a marker of effacing individuality and self-expression, which the little heroine of the film has no choice but to put back on. Probably most patently marked by the pandemic was Andy Mitton’s The Harbinger, the production and casting of which – using stage actors – also reflected the ensuing circumstances. Though ‘covid’ is never being expressly mentioned, the film is almost congested with the signs and elements which all of us are noe too familiar with, fitted to known horror tropes. The monster of film, inspired by the resurgent and viral image of the plague mask, is essentially a thinly-veiled symbolic vehicle, almost an icon, and as such is devoid of any developed character. Using the premise of inability to wake up from harrowing nightmares, an ailment which also curiously has a contagious quality, the film assumes the form of a labyrinthine dream that permeates into reality. Apparently taking its cue from distortion in perceptual and subjective experiences during times of restrictions and isolation, the film still follows in the footsteps of its predecessors in the genre. However, weaving a fluid structure around a stream of dreams doesn’t seem an accomplishment the director could ably pull off. There is this question as to why Monique – the protagonist and the friend of the woman originally racked with waking dreams- should suffer the same experience; while in her friend’s case this can be put down to her isolation, Monique seems to simply catch it from her. There seems to be something about Monique past that remains unclarified. The reason for this contagiousness should probably be sought in the film’s in-your-face symbolism, which is plainly delivered in its dialogues; a feature that moves the film away from the realm of Nightmare at Elm Street, but doesn’t necessary land it in a prestigious position.
A contagious curse, albeit of an unknown origin is also at work in Yutaro Kubo’s animated feature The girl from the other side, one that causes oblivion. The film deals with a borderline character who is already marked enough with the curse to look different and rejected by humans, but has not completely joined the ranks of so-called ‘outsiders’. Finding a little girl left by herself whose family could have been victims of the curse, he feels an obligation to take her back to human society and save her from having a similar fate. Slow-paced and contemplative for the most part and contained in emotions, The girl from the other side ends up picturing the liminal existence of its heroes not in a miserable light but as a ground for forging affectionate ties. Despite having a fantastic setting, the film avoids any hyperbole in its animation and uses the simple black and white contrast to set up different inhabitants of its world who are all engulfed in an evergreen magical landscape.
The Italian master of giallo, Dario Argento makes use of grown-up/child partnership in an unsurprisingly more morbid context in his newest picture, Dark glasses. The film’s mesmerising opening scene and its first breath-taking sequences suggest maestro’s return to form, as does the film’s pulsating music which harkens back to landmarks of his career. To our disappointment and despite an enticing premise – a hooker blinded by an attempt on her life and feeling under the constant threat from the culprit, finds an ally in a Chinese boy- the final result falls too short of expectations it arises. Too early in the film the obvious hints as to the identity of the killer are dropped and his eventual unmasking – if there’s such a thing- happens prematurely. Closer to its end, Dark glasses veers into the direction of a survival film which is arguable not Argento’s forte. The typically convoluted mystery forming the core of giallo film has been significantly toned down and the climax remains tepid and fails to have the spectator at the edge of their seat, as it would have befitted an ‘Argento’ film. One normally wouldn’t have expected Argento to make a statement on prostitution, but the protagonist even lacks the sophistication needed to elicit an adequate emotional response. The ‘outsider’ figure embodied here by the Chinese boy doesn’t seem to benefit the film either. Conceivably a gimmick to receive funding and financial support, he simply feels out of step with the director’s universe.
In Natalia Sinelnikova’s We might as well be dead notions such as inclusion and exclusion into societies, borders and threat of aliens are addressed in allegorical terms. With opening image of a newcomer couple desperate for being allowed into a fenced off residential complex, the director establishes a safe haven that offers its inhabitants protection from the external world. But this much sought peace and security proves to be fragile and the smallest hint of threat or intrusion generates cracks that run deep in this supposed shelter and make divisions amongst inhabitants based on the length of their membership. The newer community members are viewed with suspicion, even if they were previously trusted with the responsibility of gatekeeping. In this hostile environment, the effectively 2nd class community members are turned against and even frame one another in hopes of rebuilding the shaken trust, but that only leads to their own expulsion. Selecting origins other than Western Europe for her stigmatised characters, Sinelnikova makes no attempt to conceal the film’s unsparing allegory about Europe. But the film’s narrative is not solely guided by this allegorical function and is endowed with a self-contained central logic and characters are duly given their own dramatic roles.
Privileged societies and people excluded from them are similarly central to Kristina Buozyte and Bruno Samper’s Vesper, presented in a familiar ground for their emergence, i.e. an explicitly science-fictional context of a dystopian world. Charting a future plagued with food shortage in the aftermath of an ecological debacle, the film feels very much of its time and even- considering the few years it took from conception to completion- prophetic. In picturing a highly stratified future where privileged people have built their own hermetic ‘citadels’ and lifelike androids are hunted down once showing human intelligence, Vesper declares its line of descent from classics like Metropolis and Blade Runner, but also its organic looking equipment and contraptions call to mind some images from Cronenberg films. The film infuses the genre with a fresh feeling through choosing both of its two main characters- the resolute and scientifically-talented Vesper and the crush-landed android- as teenagers and females who come under threat of Vesper’s Fagin-like, exploitive and spiteful uncle and the gang of kids belonging to him. Here the android not only looks more human than faceless and silent agents missioned to capture her, she also contains a secret which can overthrow for good the oppressive and inhuman order enforced by citadels. As long as the precocious talents of the young protagonist passes muster with the audience, Vesper can be counted as a fruitful attempt in expanding the genre with its own brand of fantasy, which is delivered through immaculate visuals.
The Korean film, The fifth thoracic vertebrae (Park Syeyoung) features the organic fantasy on a much smaller and more modest scale. The film follows the growth of a mould in a mattress that keeps changing hands. Originating as a personal story by director’s account and made with a tiny crew, the film is an experience in low-fi and almost minimalist science fiction, employing only limited practical effects and relying considerably on its sound design to establish the fantasy of an invasive and evolving living creature. At some points in the film, it appears that the narrative stalls and veers off temporarily towards melodrama and the mould is taking the back seat. Despite inflicting injury on people, the mould – and the mattress it’s lodging in- are not simply vilified as deadly things, but the goal as the director himself explained has been to stress on tenacity of the living organism and its desire to live on. This process of humanisation of the entity even takes a literal form, when its extending mass gradually assumes the form of human limbs as attacking the victims to build its own body; however an anticipated full transformation never materialises.
Severing a limb in a moment of absurd fashion in Linnea Frye’s feminist short, Lily’s mirror opens the doors to an alternative image of our world, where MeToo movement is still relevant and given a supernatural voice. Here a ghost mirror which was meant to help the victim cope with her disability functions as a mouthpiece for silenced voice of victimised women and expresses their agony. But even this magical intervention doesn’t seem to change the institutionalised order of things and at the end of the day the woman’s remaining option is to mete out justice on her own and ‘single-handedly’.
Despite festival’s reputation as one devoted to genre cinema, its selections oftentimes contain pictures which flout all known generic conventions whatsoever. One such off-the-wall picture on this year’s line-up, Pieta by the openly queer Spanish director Eduardo Casanova, brings together Spain and North Korea in the most unthinkable way which flows from director’s avowed denial of the existence of freedom. The authoritarian parallel is built through the figure of a dominant and overprotective mother who through her erratic behaviour impersonates a manipulative and controlling force in life of her cancer-ridden son. The film wears the director’s antipathy to realism all over its sleeves with its highly stylised images composed with a restricted colour palette- pink abounds!- and sometimes in soft focus. Notwithstanding their eye-candy quality, images of the film also carry provocative content. Though in introduction of the film, Mitch Davis, the director of the festival hinted at a similarity with Jodorowsky’s cinema, the combination of visual provocation and a dominant mother might evoke the work of another artist connected to Panic Movement (Arrabal and his Viva La Muerte). As its title suggests, Pieta draws on religious iconography in ways which are inevitably subversive, not simply because of queer sensibilities running through the film, but also due to tarring the sacred notion of maternal love with her desire to control. Pieta also suggests this desire to control is matched with a wish to be controlled in the other party, when it establishes a visual parallel between North Koreans’ weeping over their leader’s demise and the son mourning the death of overbearing mother and feeling insecure about stepping into the outside world with no one to lean on. The director’s assertion about impossibility of freedom indeed lies in dynamics of these two interdependent desires.
Mother as an oppressive figure was featured in another queer oriented film shown at Fantasia 2022. Alexis Langlois’ short, The demons of Dorothy, self-reflexively portrays a young female filmmaker’s challenges of being at loggerheads with the mainstream system of filmmaking, which suppresses personal sensibilities, especially when they are markedly perverse. Here the mother makes an intrusive appearance and her persistent voice of discouragement adds to the titular young director’s predicament. Rejected for running afoul of media’s idealised image of an artist, Dorothy envisions a rebellion by joining force with her own creations, turning the table of film festival game on its head. Empowered by this alliance and in a nod to her namesake from the Wizard of OZ, she ends the film on a note of resolve by vanquishing the witch-like mother. Likewise in another queer short titled Tank Fairy (Erich Rettstadt) mother plays the role of an agent of conformity who taunts her son for expressing his feminine side, while being remiss about her own grooming. Dripping with vibrant colours and as a celebration of colourfulness and foppishness, the film’s eye-candy visuals present a distinctly campy quality derived from the world of commercials.
Yann Gonzalez’s new short Hideous contemplates on the queer concept of beauty in tandem with its flipside, as it transpires from the title. A short musical or a compilation of music videos for its singer and musician lead and acutely personal, the film confronts head-on with the public perception of difference as something triggering fear, aversion and disgust. Switching from light-heartedness of childhood scenes to harsh rejection in adulthood, Hideous becomes a celebration of monstrosity, which in tune with previous works of the director and other major gay artists is presented through a campy lens.
In Exalted Mars the director Jean-Sébastien Chauvin performs an experience in visualising the male orgasm through the strategy of ‘not showing’. We see a sleeping naked man, presumably dreaming, and hear his heavy breathing, but just as in real life no access is given to fantasies coursing his mind. Rather, his image is intercut and accompanied with arbitrary-looking scenes from the city at night. This ambiguous juxtaposition creates a sense of mystery and surrounds the whole nocturnal orgasm in some sort of otherworldly beauty. By keeping the fantasy impenetrable and instead picturing the outward manifestation of the climax in an almost celebratory manner, film shows an unapologetic fixation with physicality. A solitary act of sexual indulgence opens Daphne Gardner‘s In the Flesh too, but before long the heroine’s pleasure of self-gratification in the bathtub is disrupted by a disturbing vision of abject, when the water pipes suddenly become clogged. The film invests in the common usage of basement as a substitute image for subconscious and guides its heroine there in order for her to confront with what has ‘clogged’ the stream of enjoyment and to come to terms with it. The protagonist’s acceptance and resumption of joy is presented through an image that is somehow redolent of Julia Ducournau’s Titane.
A more extreme strain of cinema in terms of content was represented by this year’s winner of Cheval Noir, Megalomaniac. Karim Ouelhaj’s unrelenting, grisly and pitch-dark picture, blends together narratives of a psychotic serial killer and rape/revenge by envisioning their respective central characters as siblings. The film eschews the habitual orientation towards the rape victim, presenting the sister in an ambivalent light. Unsightly and gripped with mental and physical issues she learns about her brother’s criminal spree by paying a secret visit to his room, but entering the ’forbidden room’ appears to bring out her dark side rather than a sympathy with victims, evidently due to experience of unceasing humiliation and her troubled mind. This demonstrates itself in her interaction with the kidnapped girl, whose life she’s pleads with the brother to spare. The sister’s treatment of the captive girl suggests as if she wants the latter as her own plaything and some sort of pet. In fact, sister’s bonds with her murderous brother which are reinforced incestuously seem too strong to be affected by any sense of sisterhood. The film features an intense, bloody and ultra-bleak hell-on-the-earth finale, the closest it evokes in these qualities is that of Kihachi Okomoto’s The Sword of Doom. I suspect this kinship could come from the fact that both films were supposed to be part of a bigger thing (Okamoto’s samurai film was intended to be the first in a series, while Oulehaj told the spectators that the finished film is only the 2nd half of his original script). In the climactic fight scene of Megalomaniac, the raw violence running throughout the film reaches its grisly zenith, but the jerky camerawork blurs it into something of an impressionistic beauty. This feast of blood is also linked with another ominous birth and as such heralds perpetuation of the curse and deepens sombreness of the finale.
The newest film by the prolific – and now a Fantasia fixture- Mickey Reece, Country gold, could offer the breather one might ask for after encountering such a smothering darkness. The film also testifies to Reece’s desire to work in a varied range of genres. In a departure from his last two personalised outings in horror and nunsploitation genres, Reece this time treats us to a fictionalised biopic, organised around a meeting between a celebrity singer and his idol, a has-been artist. As expected, meeting the role model in flesh and blood only leads to disenchantment. The comedy of the film originates from the conflict the protagonist experiences between his own conservative and traditional values and the self-indulgent way of life his idol has thrown himself into. To add to his dismay, he should lend an ear to the old singer’s confessions about his undercover, the sort of thing one can hardly take any pride in. Reece’s penchant for witty humorous dialogue finds it right place here, while in manner of his earlier films there are quirky moments which work as some sort of digression. During the Q&A, the director explained that those scenes were later additions to the script, motivated by a demand to change the name of the protagonist into a fictional one. In their oddity, these scenes resonate well with the film’s comic orientation. One would wish if there were more of these moments and they were thought of further in advance for a better integration in the film’s formal structure.
The festival’s programme also featured films which fell on the more traditional and generic side of the spectrum. Toshiro Saiga’s Red Shoes is a typical sport drama about a female boxer who not only has to give her athletic career a new lease on life, but as a widow must also fight for the right to the custody of her little daughter. The two threads intertwine, but it is the motherhood and the melodramatic content that come first and drive the other. In the course of the events of the film, the woman’s claim to motherhood has to be proven and reaffirmed by way of excelling in a sport which is traditionally seen as masculine and associated with violence. As a hybrid melodrama, Saiga’s film is packed with tropes, from the resentment between the woman and her mother-in-law to the scene of little girl running away and making it to her mother’s decisive match. There is also the narrative device of a handicap, the bread and butter of sport films, but the way it affects the final outcome once again confirms the film’s stronger affinity with the family melodrama. For all these unabashed familiarities, the film still doesn’t fail to click with a spectator who simply seeks pure entertainment.
Jean Rollin, the French director of low-budget Eurohorror films is no stranger to aficionados of cult cinema, thanks to the books such as Immoral tales which started coming out from the 90s and later accessibility of his films via home video and digital releases. In their documentary on the life and work of Rollin, Orchestrator of storms, Dima Ballin and Kat Ellinger apparently aim to broaden his recognition and take his name to a wider circle of genre fans and film buffs. Film serves an as introduction to the unique but generally – as the interviewees argue – misapprehended cinematic world of the French director, deride and disregard by critics of the time as cheap exploitation. The film’s goal is to rectify this stigma and rehabilitate Rollin’s position. Using an all-too-common talking head approach and mixing the interviews with clips from Rollin films, Orchestrator of storms follows Rollin’s life in a chronological order and from its very first minutes traces and highlights influences from the high culture and avantgarde movements which had been present in the director life and imbued his sensibilities since the formative childhood days. The film expands on the actualisation of these influences – most notably surrealism and then symbolism – in Rollin’s cinema, something conventionally overlooked since he worked in genres branded as disreputable and not worthy of a serious consideration. We are presented to the director’s ordeal – not substantially different from those of many others – which yet inevitably gave shape to his unmistakable signature style: an ambition to make something different and of a more refined taste while working in a lowbrow format that demanded making concessions and under financial constrains. Many of the topics the film touches upon have already been dealt with in more depth and in a more erudite and researched manner in an edited volume on the French director which was published a few years ago. But for those unfamiliar with Rollin, this documentary surely serves as an enticing initiation into the works of a criminally misunderstood auteur and engenders enough temptation for delving further into his reverie-like films.
As a matter of fact, the recipient of this year’s Canadian trailblazer award from festival was no one but the publisher of the abovesaid book on Rollin, Kier-La Janisse, who deservedly collected this trophy for her extensive contribution to the field of genre cinema over recent years. Working devotedly in any conceivable capacity to expand the knowledge of horror cinema and to bring its obscure corners into full view, Janisse was also present to launch a new edition of her famous book House of Psychotic Women, an influential writing that also testifies to a strong personal drive underlying and propelling her career. Following receiving the award Janisse took part in an almost two-hour long conversation to give an overview of this journey of engagement with horror cinema which started as a one-woman festival organiser and is now spanning over two decades. Full of entertaining anecdotes, Janisse account was an inspirational one which also reminded us of the supportiveness of a close-knit circle of curators, festival organisers and home-video producers, sometimes with interchangeable roles, who work collaboratively to prepare the most glorious presentation of the forgotten legacy of genre cinema. It would also be tempting to think if today’s genre cinema would be ever capable of inspiring coming generations to rediscover and reappreciate them with the same level of zeal.
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