WHEN BLACK BIRDS FLY (2016)

Dir. Jimmy ScreamerClauz, USA, 105 mins

It has to be said – watching horror on a regular basis does make you trawl through some pretty terrible movies. But you keep coming back, waiting and hoping for those glorious moments where a director absolutely smashes it out of the park and delivers horror at its very best – startling, original and impactful. We’re talking the likes of Martyrs, Flowers, Singapore Sling, The Woman and a handful more that you just know will stay with you forever, those rarefied movies that restore your faith in a genre that can be much more miss than hit.

Welcome to the club, Jimmy ScreamerClauz, because When Black Birds Fly has just earned its place among those movies.

We recently looked at ScreamerClauz’s second movie, Where The Dead Go To Die, which was bizarre and fascinating and featured what was – for me - one of the most disturbing passages in cinema with its final instalment, The Masks That The Monsters Wear. It was a singular and unique piece of work but certainly felt a little rough and ready in terms of its look and sometimes in the delivery of its ideas. When Black Birds Fly rectifies both of those things, delivering a smoother animation style and voice-over – while keeping all of the bizarre flavour – as well as focusing on a single, fascinating idea and exploring it to its fullest. Put simply, all of the promise of WTDGTD is gloriously delivered here.

Our story follows Marius, a young boy ‘born’ – in a mighty strange opening sequence – into a community called Heaven, which is watched over Big-Brother style by a religious icon called Caine. The only rule of Heaven is not to go beyond the wall, because evil waits on the other side. All of this is watched over by the masked, gun-toting figures of OSWA, a force put together to fight evil. The world-building is great – all the way down to the family watching tele-plays praising Caine and the shadowiness of the black and white world of Heaven is fantastic, only broken by the lurid colours of Caine’s posters and propaganda. Oh, and the blood, when that starts to arrive.

Of course, given that set-up, it’s not long before Marius and his friend Dotty discover a hole in the wall and are tempted through it by The Evil One, who lures them out disguised as an injured cat they want to help. The world outside of Heaven is an absolutely technicolour nightmare, and the contrast between that and our main setting is absolutely superb. The attention to detail on the background animation is genuinely great, in fact. From there we explore the strange backstory of God’s creation of man and woman, which looks absolutely fantastic and studies some incredible ideas.

There was simply no point at which I could take my eyes of this movie – I was absolutely transfixed all the way through, whether that was by the core concept and the dystopian landscape parading as ‘Heaven’, the strangeness of the imagery and visuals, the darkness of the plot, the inventiveness of the religious backstory… it all combines for a heady concoction.

When Black Birds Fly is everything that I look for in a movie – sharply original, visually unique, dark, brooding and so deep with ideas that it is bound to reward repeat viewing. I’d never genuinely have thought that an animation could have delivered something like this, but I’m certainly delighted to have found this one and the work of this director. As per WTDGTD, this isn’t likely to be for everybody, but it hit all the buttons perfectly for me. If you cross Adult Swim with your worst nightmare, then sprinkle a healthy dose of religious concepts on top,  you might end up with something like this.
RATING: 10/10. It’s been a while since I dished out top marks, but When Black Birds Fly is well deserving of it. Rarely can you say that ‘you won’t see anything else like this’, but in this case I can say it and mean it. Daringly different, deliciously dark and deceptively deep, WBBF demonstrates a unique director at the peak of his powers delivering what feels like his magnum opus. Not to be missed for any extreme horror fans out there.

HORROR NEWS: FRIGHTFEST PRESENTS THE DARK  ON DVD AND DIGITAL 22 OCT

​HORROR FILM REVIEW: STILL/BORN