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| By far my favorite poster of the past 5 years!! |
As I've been running around the planet, giving papers and being all sorts of academic, the year has flew by, and before I knew it, the first announcement of the 2018 Fantasia Film Festival's line-up has happened! While one only makes final decisions once the schedule is up, I love the anticipation that builds as the event draws closer. Of course I perused the first announcement with painstaking care to get excited about what's brewing this year. Here are some tasty items:
Horror anthologies can be hit (all women-directed
XX) or miss (the first
VHS), and most fall somewhere in between (see my review of
Tales of Halloween, for instance). Still, they can be full of hidden gems, so I'm looking forward to two big new horror anthologies screening at Fantasia this summer. First off,
Nightmare Cinema will be screening on the festival's opening night, in part as a tribute to Joe Dante, who will be receiving a lifetime achievement award at the festival. Five filmmakers will be presenting their visions of horror for the project: Alejandro Brugues (
Juan of the Dead), Joe Dante (
Gremlins), Mick Garris (
Hocus Pocus), Ryuhei Kitamura (
The Midnight Meat Train), and David Slade (
30 Days of Night). Tony Timpone is hosting, and he's great at these events--many of the directors are likely to be there. A little bit of a mixed bag, but the conceit is that Mickey Rourke plays "the projectionist," and is the link to the five films. Check out this picture!
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| Is Mickey Rourke hanging out with...Dracula?? |
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Honestly, I'm even more excited about
The Field Guide to Evil which headlines some of my favorite filmmakers for this anthology. This upcoming horror anthology is directed by
Ashim Ahluwalia, Yannis Veslemes, Can Evrenol, Severin Fiala, Veronika
Franz, Katrin Gebbe Calvin Reeder, Agnieszka Smoczynska, and Peter
Strickland. So the directors of
Housewife,
Goodnight Mommy, The Lure, and
The Duke of Burgundy are being represented here. Check out an image from Peter Strickland's contribution:
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| A folktale influence in The Cobbler's Lot, Peter Strickland's contribution to A Field Guide to Evil |
This image is so gorgeous, and unsurprisingly unsettling and poetic coming from a filmmaker with such skill. The film screened at SXSW, the lucky bums. I wouldn't miss it.
The 2014 Fantasia Film Festival was rife with time travel films/puzzle films, and I love them. I've used quite a few films that I saw at Fantasia for my puzzle films class--
The One I Love,
Predestination,
Infinite Man,
The House at the End of Time. I'm really hard to please when it comes to comedies, but New Zealand's
Mega Time Squad sounds suitably nuts, and might be fun to insert in all that puzzle film darkness.
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| Two-bit criminals stumble on a time travel device in Mega Time Squad |
As a "haunted house" film fan, I try to see as many of these films as possible, and this one happens to hail from Canada (a country in which I wish I lived).
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| Love the tag line! |
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The Camera Lucida section of the Fantasia Film Festival
is dedicated to experimental, boundary-pushing and auteur-driven
works of genre cinema, and I want to see all four of its announced titles. These films are often like nothing you've ever seen before. David Robert Mitchell's Under the Silver Lake has gotten some mixed reviews when it's screened elsewhere, but it looks quirky and unsettling, and I'm willing to give it a shot. The director of It Follows has definitely got vision.
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| Riley Keough channeling Marilyn in Under the Silver Lake | |
The Fantasia staff tantalizingly describes Luz: "LUZ recalls the best of
’70s arthouse and Euro-horror (Zulawski, Fulci, and even Fassbinder come
to mind), without ever giving way to pastiche or citation. Instead, LUZ
is a mise-en-scène tour-de-force; an experimental subversion of the
familiar possession narrative by way of avant-garde theatre – even shot
in scope on gorgeous 16mm!"--You had me at Zulawski.
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| His eyes are a dead giveaway in Tilman Singer's Luz | |
I'm a latecomer to Josephine Decker's films--I wasn't really clued into her work when Fantasia screened both Butter on the Latch and Thou Wast Mild and Lovely in 2014 (cut me some slack, it was my first year attending). Both films are available for screening on SHUDDER, Btw. As someone very committed to screening work by female directors, I'm very excited to see her newest film Madeline's Madeline, which sounds suitably smart, dark, and complex.
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| Josephine Decker's latest film, Madeline's Madeline |
And finally, but by no means, last for a reason, the fantastic director of Hausu (1977), Nobuhiko Obayashi, after having recovered from stage four lung cancer (?!) will be screening his latest film, Hanagatami. I'm so glad he's recovered and making films, for his zany filmmaking is utterly unique.
I'm a fan of Andy Mitton's 2016 film We Go On--it's smart and nuanced with some great surprises--so sign me up for his latest solo venture, a film entitled The Witch in the Window, about another haunted house.
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| Andy Mitton's creepy The Witch in the Window--shades of The Sentinel? |
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Not to "toot my own horn" whatever that means, but I know quite a bit about erotic thrillers. I haven't really been writing about these films for a while (Noe and Von Trier didn't do it for me), but I cannot help but be intrigued by Cam, which the Fantasia staff describes as "a surrealistic thriller
set in the world of webcam erotica in which an ambitious young camgirl
(“The Handmaid Tale”’s Madeline Brewer) discovers that she’s
inexplicably been replaced on her site with an exact replica of herself –
a replica that knows personal things only she could know, and is
considerably less guarded about privacy. The control that she has over
her life, and the people in it, begins to break away." It's also written by a former sex worker, so it will have a ring of authenticity. And it looks gorgeous. They say it "borders on Lynchian." Sold.
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| Isa Mazzei and Danny Goldhaber’s Cam sounds like an erotic thriller puzzle film |
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One of my favorite films screened at Fantasia in recent years is Su-jin Lee's Han Gong-Ju (2013), so when the Fantasia staff waxes poetically about Last Child (2017), I take notice. Writer/director Shin
Dong-seok’s masterpiece recently secured the coveted White Mulberry
Award for Best Debut Film at the Udine Far East Film Festival, so I'm looking forward to being moved by strong Korean filmmaking.
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| A moving image from Shin Dong-seok's Last Child (2017) | |
Rounding up the list of titles in which I'm interested, I'm also looking at Justin P. Lange's The Dark, Parallel, shot by my cinematographic crush, Karim Hussain, The Ranger, which has also gotten some mixed reviews, but it's directed by producer Jenn Wexler, so why not. Satan's Slaves is an Indonesian Haunted House film tempting for the title alone, and Skate Kitchen, also women-directed, about a NYC female skateboarding crew are on the list. Here's a few last images to tempt you:
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| An undead teenage girl befriends a blind boy in Justin P. Lange's The Dark |
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| Jenn Wexler's The Ranger has got a cool, punk vibe |
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| Not quite what I expected for the film's title, Satan's Slaves |
