ARROW VIDEO FRIGHTFEST HALLOWEEN EVENT 2019

 
If you have attended a FrightFest event at any time over the last twenty years you will know that it is about more than just the films. There is a rich sense of community to these events, a deep sense of shared experience and passion. This was certainly the case at this year’s Halloween event, at the Leicester Square Cineworld on Saturday 2nd November.
 
Passion was very much at the heart of the opening film, Josh Hasty’s Candy Corn, made as a loving tribute to John Carpenter’s original Halloween. Hasty not only wrote and directed the film but also edited it and co-composed the beautifully atmospheric score. He even had a hand in the costume design! It is a very personal film, made for a very specific audience, perhaps reflected in its presentation of a tight community of outsiders and eccentrics working in a fairground sideshow who see the rest of the world as the ‘freaks’. The leader of this community, the deranged and diminutive ‘Doctor Death’, is forced to take drastic and diabolical action when his new employee, a mentally challenged young resident of a small town, is attacked and killed by local bullies. Dark forces are summoned to re-animate the young man as a vengeful boogeyman and set him on a path of brutal and bloody justice over the course of a hellish Halloween night.

Hasty is clearly in thrall to the passages in Carpenter’s film where the camera pans along streets of houses while the strangely hypnotic ‘music box’ tones of the score suggest the menace lurking behind the daylight and domesticity. Those are some of the greatest moments of anticipation in cinema and Hasty lovingly crafts many of his own such moments here. Indeed, the leisurely opening credits work beautifully to establish a similar effect as they follow the doomed young man from his dilapidated house in the woods over a bridge and through the streets of the town, a location rich in melancholy autumn colours. The score is a clear homage to Carpenter with added richness and reflective qualities.

Indeed, the quality of reflection is the most striking aspect of this film. There are wonderful moments when the local sheriff and his young assistants stand overwhelmed by shock and grief when they discover the various victims. Hasty cleverly links these boldly static scenes to glimpses of melodramatic moments in old monochrome horror films – Bela Lugosi in The Phantom Creeps and Vincent Price in The Bat. Of course we are reminded that Carpenter punctuated the original Halloween with scenes from black and white horrors, playing on televisions in various living rooms. The effect there was to heighten anticipation, to suggest classic horror creeping into the cosiness of a modern household, where nothing could be safe. Here the focus is on reflection rather than anticipation – the films are playing not on a television but on the screen of an old cinema. The meta-cinema time warp in which this film is taking place is not one of immediate terror but of heightened memory – here it is no longer just black and white films that can be considered old or classic but original, gruesome slasher films. In this world, unlike the world of Carpenter’s original, the discovery of hideously mutilated corpses can evoke a memory of film alongside any more immediate visceral response. And that is this film’s powerful statement and greatest strength – the understanding that as spectators we inevitably view so much ‘new’ horror now with reflection more than shock.
 
The most awe-inspiring, if not perhaps the most moving, example of personal vision and passion in the day came in the form of Kevin McTurk’s 15-minute short The Haunted Swordsman, presenting one stage in the epic quest of a samurai hunting a demon. Made entirely with puppets, this was truly extraordinary, a fragment of a giant dream that may never be fully realised…which is surely the point. McTurk leaves us with the sense not just of a world and a story beyond our imaginings but also of a magnificent masterpiece yet to be discovered, a film on a mythical, magical scale far exceeding any other…and of the very real wizard who could conjure it into being if only he had an eternity in which to do it.
 
The second full feature of the day, Marc Meyers’ We Summon the Darkness, was characterised by a gleefully dark cynicism rather than personal passion – and it was a total blast. Bursting with energy and played with wicked wit and relish by its young cast, this tells the story of a trio of girls who befriend three young men at a heavy metal concert and invite them back to a fabulous house for a night of drunken fun and games. Rumours of satanic killings inspired by heavy metal music are circulating and there is a clear sense that something is going to go terribly wrong. It does…but not in the ways one might at first expect. Once the film locates itself in this house it has huge fun finding fresh ways of exploring the classic theme of the darkness and violence that can be found behind affluent walls. In more ways than one it has echoes of Get Out as a social satire (with religious fanaticism rather than racism being the order of the day here) but it is a wilder, messier, funnier ride – one that deserves to find a mainstream audience.
 
The third feature, Paul Davis’ Uncanny Annie, returned us to the idea of individual passion and vision, to a surprising degree given that it was not conceived as a personal project at all but was instead part of the ‘Into the Dark’ series of horror stories produced by Hulu on festive themes. The festival in question here is, appropriately enough, Halloween. A fairly typical group of college age kids are gathered in the living room of a house. They could be out partying but instead they intend to stay there and play games out of respect for one of their friends, who drowned mysteriously in very shallow water exactly a year ago. The titular board game is discovered in the basement and before long the kids fall under its very dark spell and are drawn into its nightmare world, where the house they are gathered in floats in a black void and where death is a terrifyingly real threat.

There is a psychological and moral dimension to this film that lifts it beyond the ‘tricksy’ concept. The void in which the kids find themselves can be seen as a projection of the guilt, rage and painful secrets that the game ultimately forces them to reveal. The ensuing drama is played with a powerful sense of sincerity by the young cast and marshalled with a genre-literate but also very sensitive eye by Davis, who spoke very movingly in a live Q and A about the ways in which the experience and memories of making the film were juxtaposed with the recent loss of his mother and accompanying feelings of isolation and grief. Ultimately the whole communal experience of sharing, discussing and reflecting on the film became an exercise in staring into the void in more ways than one – and a powerful reminder that immersion in a horror story can be a cathartic, healthy and even beautiful way of processing death and loss.

The discussion with Paul Davis brought a welcome emotional depth to the day. FrightFest’s wonderful director Paul McEvoy then continued this passionate thread in his introduction to the next film, Carlo Mirabella Davis’ miraculous Swallow. McEvoy informed us this was his favourite film of the year – in any genre. We were warned to expect an emotional gut punch…and that it would take time to process our thoughts and feelings as the end credits were rolling. He was absolutely right.

At the bleeding heart of the film is a performance of quietly shattering emotional intensity by Haley Bennett as a young woman who has married into a highly controlling, wealthy family. She has become an accessory wife, expected to maintain an immaculate home and exist within it as little more than a silently breathing ornament. The young woman is already feeling trapped, defeated and suffocated by the illusion of light and space and the charade of romance when she discovers she is pregnant. Unable to establish a connection with the young life growing inside her, a life she feels is already owned by her husband’s family, she develops a warped compulsion to take back a sense of ownership and control over her body by putting other things inside her…swallowing objects such as marbles, thumbtacks and batteries. As these things are discovered and drawn out of her, other things she holds within – deep emotions and painful secrets – are also agonisingly removed and held under a harsh light, until ultimately she gives herself no choice but to seek a private catharsis.

This is the kind of film mid-period Cronenberg might have made (the Cronenberg of Dead Ringers, Crash or Spider) if he was adapting and updating Ibsen. It has a coldly polished aesthetic of terrible, empty beauty, at the core of which, in powerful relief, stands Bennett, her pretty features in a constant state of tension between the soft flesh of a damaged, delicate soul and the plastic shell in which her married role is encasing her. A late scene in which she confronts her father is one of the most powerful screen duologues I have seen in a very long time.

How wonderful it would have been to follow this masterpiece with a genre film that could have reached the same heights – a Roemary’s Baby or a Candyman. Unfortunately we had Patrick Lussier’s Trick, which returned us to the general Halloween theme and was trying to do something new with the slasher formula but simply ended up seeming loud, chaotic and just too busy in its relentless quest to keep throwing set-pieces and surprises at us. I hate to say it but in its concentration on concept over character or dramatic development it was all trick and no treat. Yes, I know…a lame pun – but the film deserves it.
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I was unfortunately unable to catch the final film of the day, Scare Package, because I had to make sure I got a train back to Sussex before midnight. One is tempted to play on the Halloween theme and make a lame joke about carriages and pumpkins. I was sorry to have to miss it as it promises to be huge fun…and indeed many of the posts on social media about this event have identified it as one of the highlights of the day. I look forward to catching up with it in due course and making sure it gets its due attention here on Ginger Nuts. And I certainly look forward to next year’s Halloween event. FrightFest really does represent the heart of contemporary horror cinema.