(Original text from Absolute Underground Issue #70 - originally published June, 2016)
“The
Cinema Fantastique (Sex & Horror)”
by
Vince D'Amato
I
was recently in Netherworld Collectibles in Burnaby, BC, when I
overheard a customer chatting with the proprietor and telling him,
rather loudly so that most of the store could accidentally
overhear him, that he “doesn't watch new horror movies at all
because most of them seem really cool but they just disappoint”.
Well, to be perfectly honest, this was a sentiment I shared for along
time, until about a year and a half ago... One of the problems with
new horror cinema was the perception that the genre itself was
precipitating over its intended audience – new filmmakers were
either pushing forth pretentious projection of their work that they
considered high-brow, or to use the term some if these filmmakers
were using five years ago, an “upper echelon” of horror cinema.
Which basically meant cool-looking horror flick with no sex or
nudity, which throughout the eighties and nineties had been required
tropes for the genre, along with the blood, guts and scares. These
“upper echelon” films, like House of the Devil, The
Innkeepers, Mulberry Street, and
to half this degree Your're Next, also
barely delivered on the guts and gore aspect, usually saving such
frivolities to the very end of their respective films (as I said,
You're Next was
somewhat of an exception, and as added bonus points it had Barbara
Crampton in it!). On the flipside, if a horror fan did want a little
nudity or eroticism included within his genre fare (artistically, of
course), one would be forced to turn to the ridiculous – indie
films like Call Girl of Cthulhu or
the exploitive (and yet vapid) Hollywood remakes of the
aforementioned 80s horror films. There
was nowhere for us to turn to the seriously good side horror cinema
that wasn't afraid to be sexy as hell as well...
In
December last year I wrote my first Absolute Horror article; and the
inspiration for that article had been the recent releases of
independent horror films that had finally started to change the face
of indie horror into something more sophisticated, more energetic,
more suspenseful for audiences (such as myself) who have learned (i.e
taught ourselves) not to rely on the studio PG-13 output for their
morbid frights. We have been ushered into an era, by these new indie
horror filmmakers, of films that may have originally been inspired by
the likes of Friday the 13th or
the films of John Carpenter, Wes Craven, and Sam Raimi, but films
that nonetheless do not care to wear these influences outright on
their sleeves – instead, these filmmakers are now often twisting
and flipping the influences to such a degree as to design some very
intense, visceral, and even darkly comedic low-budget scares. And
they're pretty clever about it, too. And thanks to the critically and
commercially successful Scarlett Johansson sci-fi horror/thriller
Under the Skin and the
hugely popular indie horror hit It Follows, we're
starting to see a little sexiness reappearing in our horror fare –
following these two commercial releases it seems to all be suddenly
okay once again for a horror movie to be sexually aware, instead of
pretending that people don't have it. (Meanwhile, Brain DePalma
remained cemented in the gorgeously sexy slasher/thriller genre with
his latest outing Passion,
most criminally under-screened on this side of the world). But before
we fully get back into sexy, allow me to talk about a very clever
realization of the horror film that I came across about two days
before writing this piece – a little film called The Last
Shift which is an hallucinogenic
mindfuck regarding a lone young female police rookie hired to guard a
defunct police station the before it's permanently closed. It gets
off to an edgy start and just gets totally intense from there, as our
protagonist becomes trapped in the tomb-maze of the old station while
running into some quite literal ghosts of the past who are hellbent
on driving her insane. This small-scale horror flick calls up the
intensity of the modern horror classic It Follows, as
does new director Benjamin Moody's Last Girl Standing,
which had its inspirational
roots in the aforementioned Friday the 13th,
but takes the idea of “the
final girl” into dizzyingly outrageous and wholly intense
territory. Last Girl Standing has
been a festival hit in 2015 and 2016, and will be screening at this
summer's Cinemafantastique Fest in
Vancouver (July 8-10) along with some other amazing contemporary
horror films that are far more steeped in the sexy, hallucinogenic,
and the psychedelic: from the Burlesque-noir Cruel Tale of
the Medicine Man and L.A. artist
Anna Biller's erotic 60s throwback The Love Witch, to
the erotic Lovecraft homage Harvest Lake (which
incidentally is a far cry from Call Girl of Cthulhu).
But the funnier side of genre cinema is also celebrated in b-movie
maverick Ron Bonk's She Kills,
and Canadian Ryan
LaPlante's Holy Hell;
and Hell Town
– which is an astoundingly witty homage to Lynch's Twin
Peaks. Alongside
these films is the more intense Last Girl Standing and
the neo-giallo The Red Man, but
sexy does tend to reign supreme in this lineup, as it does with the
collection of short films selected for the film fest also range from
the off-the-wall bloodfest El Gigante (from Luchagore
productions) to the very sexy
First Love and
Mistress C. The sexy
and the funny (the bloody funny)
collide in the French short Bitch, Popcorn & Blood.
Indeed, the international
collection of very sexy nightmares that populate this year's
Cinemafantastique Fest are
the films you're not apt to see at other film festivals on the west
coast. With any luck, most of the films here will find some sort of
distribution, but we're living in a funny time now when it comes to
cinema culture. Hard media really is dying and has been niche for
some time now. It opens up the opportunity for theatrical exhibition
for films like these, but cinema has been crawling along towards a
slow death, too, despite there being more film festivals in the world
than any other time in history. Our venues are disappearing, and film
festivals have dared to go digital, like the media itself. Despite
this, there are die-hard cinema fans (like myself) who actively
participate in the lumbering medium, who love to discover obscure on
under-distributed gems. With horror filmmakers no longer settling for
the easy low-budget go-tos of the zombie or vampire sub-genres, it is
inspiring to see that so many independent genre films released over
the last fifteen months have supplied us with some real, visceral
thrills. So here's to filmmakers keeping the sexy, the erotic, the
nudie-cutie, the fun, and the intense, in our serious – and darkly
funny – horror cinema. Cheers!
No comments:
Post a Comment