I've been writing for the amazing Canadian print magazine Absolute Underground for a little more than two years now, which is somewhat unbelievable to me in terms of keeping track of time through written horror-movie articles. New to this Blogspot, I've decided to release the original, unedited articles as a sidebar project. Everything here is horror-centric, and I'm including all of the selected stills that originally went alongside the articles, many of which never appeared in the print layout. Please enjoy! And if you dig the article, you can help support he magazine by downloading their issues here: http://absoluteunderground.tv/au-magazine/volume-13
Original Text for issue # 67 (2015):
I
can't believe December is upon us already and the decade of the 2010s
are half over! Looking back over 2015, regarding horror cinema
(mostly, in my case, still of the direct-to-video format – I'm an
avid Blu-ray & DVD consumer), probably the most valuable thing
I'll take away from this year is a fully readjusted and reinvigorated
passion for indie films in the horror genre.
Decades
gone are the platinum years of Hollywood horror cinema and those
mavericks that helped usher it in – Sam Raimi, Sean Cunningham, Wes
Craven, George Romero, Roger Corman, Dan O'Bannon, Stuart Gordon,
John Carpenter – have gone on to other things, including
semi-retirement, and in the worst cases, have passed away and left us
in a world without them. And for a while, as horror cinema crept past
the dateline of the new millennium, I had high hopes for a “new
wave” of horror and splatter filmmakers that appeared to be making
a splash in Hollywood – Rob Zombie, Neal Marshall, Darren Lynn
Bousman, James Wan, Leigh Wannell. But after giving us a promising
start, I was soon disappointed to find no real new horror movement
happening in Hollywood. As their careers progressed, Bousman ended up
suing the makers of Repo Men for
ripping off his pet musical/horror project Repo: The
Genetic Opera, before embarking
on yet another horror remake (this time a Troma movie from the
seventies), James “Saw” Wan
went on to direct the passable Dead Silence and
the gory revenge thriller Death Sentence in
the midst of a continuing series of Saw sequels,
and Neal Marshall managed to
spout out Doomsday, a
frustrated Escape from New York rip-off
in the wake of that film's official remake being snatched away from
him after the British director had already spent a good year in
development and pre-production with it; meanwhile, Rob Zombie's
career was getting lost in more John Carpenter remakes (Halloween
& Halloween II), and on the
other side of horror cinema, the only significant movement going on
was the fanatic and frenetic overdose of inexplicable found-footage
fright flicks. Well, inexplicable is not exactly the right word, it
is easy to see what happened – the rabid rash of found footage
films popping up in cinemas were cheap to make, easy to market, and
they made a shitload of cash back for the studios. So was this to be
the new horror movement that defined a new decade? Some shaky-cams
and people breathing heavily into the camera? I for one had hoped
not, and yet, there seemed to be no real alternative, as the cinemas
of the mid 2000s and early 2010s were crowded with seemingly endless
imitations, remakes, and sequels. For a while, I had some great hope
for director Pascal Laugier and his film Martyrs, and
his intensely intriguing follow-up The Tall Man. But
that was now over a decade ago, and without even knowing what Laugier
has been up to lately, there's current talk of a Martyrs
remake, something no horror fan, to my knowledge, even asked for.
But
as we (and horror cinema) were heading into the new decade of the
2010s, finally I saw something (or was shown something, by a friend
of mine) that began to change my pessimistic view of new horror
cinema: the Belgian neo-giallo Amer. This
was a new independent/international genre film that got me really
excited, and I dare say inspired, to delve back into what independent
horror cinema was going to offer. Was there finally a true new wave
of horror cinema to come to us? Alas, no. But, following the dazzling
and hallucinogenic nightmare that Amer was,
we were then given British director Peter Strickland's own take on
the Italian giallo & horror genre, the meta and cleverly
understated Berberian Sounds Studio,
no less a hallucinogenic fever than its predecessor Amer.
Following these films, in 2014
and 2015 respectively, both sets of filmmakers gave us new films,
showcasing their already soaring talents – the mystery-horror
giallo The Strange Color of Your Body's Tears and
the stunning S&M lesbian nightmare The Duke of
Burgundy.
It
was after seeing a press screening of The Duke of Burgundy
at the beginning of this year
(it was early February) that I was finally fully inspired to explore
the depths of some new, independent and international horror cinema
(even though The Duke of Burgundy
isn't really a horror film,
it has its own nightmarish genre moments that allude to genre films
of the seventies). I promptly began by ordering director Patricio
Valladares' Hidden in the Woods from
Amazon.ca, a DVD that had been released by a new and seemingly
progressive genre label, Artsploitation Films. This Chilean cannibal
inbred horror gore-a-thon blew me out of my seat, and after the movie
finished I found myself literally hooked on trying to track down one
great independent horrorshow after another. At times I was
exuberantly successful, as with another of Artsploitations Films'
newer Blu-ray releases, Horsehead, a
stream-of-consciousness edgy nightmare horror film directed by Romain
Basset, which happens to co-star Catriona MacColl (from
Fulci's The Beyond); this
Blu-ray was also distributed in Canada by Black Fawn Distribution, a
relatively new up-and-coming Canadian genre distribution label, in a
very limited numbered edition of 500 copies. But on the flipside, of
course, some finds were not quite as mindblowing, although no less
interesting, like Luciano Onetti's experimental neo-giallo Sonno
Profondo (released on DVD by
BRINKvision); and the micro-budgeted slasher film celebration, Die
Die Delta Pi, which at least
gleefully ticked all the boxes for its exploitation horror outing and
boasted a catchy title, to boot. Last month, I also finally relented
to the ongoing harassment by several friends and acquaintances to
watch the 2013 horror hit You're Next, and
while I did enjoy it, my reasons for doing so – mostly its
stylistic relations to the works of the late, great literary horror
master Richard Laymon – would have likely been lost on said friends
and acquaintances. (By this time I gave up the last of my resistance
to “new” horror movies and finally watched 2014's indie hit It
Follows after a year of peer
pressure and harassment from pretty much everyone I knew). However,
my personal enjoyment of Adam Wingard's You're Next
then led me to check out a new film by producer Larry Fesseneden and
director Ted Geoghegan (who also wrote Timo Rose's 2007 backwoods
bloodbath slasher indie cult flick Barricade);
a surprisingly intense ghost/horror flick titled We Are
Still Here. With this
reinvigorated passion for indie horror films in my heart and on my
mind, I soon took a chance on a very bizarre independent Italian
horror film called Morituris, directed
by Rafaele Picchio, which is a supernatural take on the Wes Craven
cult classic Last House on the Left. Morituris is
about a group of college-aged kids who find themselves running
through the woods trying to get away from torturous, sadistic sexual
predators. The sexual violence in this film is shockingly raw and
brutal as hell, and really, you can't get a grip on any character you
can warm up to in any way whatsoever – and it's pretty clear that
the filmmaker is pushing the audience to feel this way intentionally.
The blood and rape and violence taking place then awakens some
ancient warrior beasts who suddenly pose a far more direct threat of
doom to the violent group of attackers and their already suffering
victims alike. I can't say that Morituris is
a likable movie at all, but you'd have to watch it right through to
the last line of the closing credits to get the full impact of
Picchio's undeniably well-made horror film. And it is a horror
film, have no doubt. Released just a few months ago on Blu-ray by
Synapse Films, this is another great distribution company that
although more famous for bringing b-movies and oddities out on
special edition DVDs, have never been afraid to pickup and distribute
some rabidly oddball (and explicitly over-the-top) independent horror
gems. They even released Adam “You're Next” Wingard's early
exploitation/gore film Home Sick in
2007.
I
had a chance to chat with Jerry Chandler, co-owner of Synapse Films,
about their Morituris
Blu-ray release and about independent horror films in general – of
which, Jerry tells me, Worm
and Asylum have been
two of his favourites recently. “What do I think of Morituris?
I think it's a very cool movie. I'm not crazy about the misogyny.
Usually, when I see things like that, it makes it more palatable to
see the victim get revenge by the end of the film. I didn't quite get
that satisfaction, but I found the concept and film to be quite cool
nonetheless.” He also gave us the scoop on an upcoming release
Synapse Films happens to be extremely excited about, and it sounds
like a true labour of love: “We have just completed the coolest
movie we have ever done and that is saying something! Check out our
amazing Bluray edition of Thundercrack.
We have just completed a 5 year process of licensing and restoring
the film.”
The
independent Thundercrack
has gained a cult following in Europe and the UK over the last three
decades, and for this film to finally see the light of day in North
America is definitely amazing. Huge thanks to Jerry Chandler and
Synapse Films!
So
now, championing the new indie horror that I've had the good fortune
to finally discover throughout 2015, the last thing I've put my money
towards in the closing weeks of this year – now directly at the
midpoint through the 2010s decade – was a donation to the
completion of an upcoming erotic horror-in-the-woods/Lovecraftian
indie flick called Harvest Lake,
due for release from
Forbidden Films sometime next year, which stars Ellie Church (Troma)
and Vancouver's own Tristan Risk. I am keen on keeping my sights in
the direction that these wild, kinetic films might be headed
throughout 2016 and going on through the second half of this
interesting decade...
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