Fantasia 2018--L'Inferno (1911) with live score from Maurizio Guarini from Goblin!!

Virgil leads Dante past traitors immersed in a frozen lake in L'Inferno (1911)

Every year, Fantasia has several "special events" that are always a highlight of the festival.  I've seen two Grady Hendrix performances, a presentation on the Jean Rollin book Lost Girls by Spectacular Optical, anniversary remastered screenings of The Reflecting Skin, and last year's epic cinematic experience (pour moi), the 4K remastered screening of Dario Argento's Suspiria.  At Fantasia 2018, festival goers were able to experience a truly unique event--a screening of the very first Italian feature film, L'Inferno (1911) on its 107th anniversary with a live score composed on site by Maurizio Guarini, best known for some of the most amazing soundtrack work out there (including Suspiria and Deep Red).  Not only did we get to watch this remastered silent film, but experience it with this amazing live accompaniment. 

Tinting silent films was a fairly common practice, but they really remastered the film beautifully

I'm going to crib directly from the Fantasia program here: "L'Inferno was directed by Francesco Bertolini, Adolfo Padovan and Giuseppe de Liguoro, working with more than 150 cast and crew members over a period of three years. The scale and ambition of its imagery is breathtaking, with primitive special effects that drip raw inspiration and hyper-imaginative interpretations of Hell that continue to impress over a century after they were burned into light. Having made over 2 million US dollars in its original release, it is also very likely cinema's first blockbuster."  I could not have said it better.  Plot-wise, the poet, Virgil, leads Dante through a grand tour of the circles of hell, and it's really a journey to remember.  Supposedly the film is heavily influenced by Gustav Doré's illustrations, so I promptly checked these images out after the screening, and their similarities are startling.

These Gustav Doré's illustrations really blow my mind

So many fantastic images with early special effects and experimental techniques litter this film, I really found it incredibly difficult to tear my gaze away to take notes.  Some highlights:
--carnal sinners bathed in a lavender gel swirl above Dante and Virgil's heads
--the entrance to the city of Dis is barred by demons, and they have the best costumes.  Luckily Virgil and Dante escape by jumping into a pit, to the consternation of the angry demons.

Angry demons helplessly poke at Dante and Virgil below in L'Inferno

--Harpies make their nest in branches known as "the suicides" while a synth riff that echoes Suspiria plays in the background
--A "Rain of Fire" consisting of numerous tinted and superimposed explosions lights up the screen
--Flatterers and Dissolute Women are Immersed in excrement.  Yuk.
--In a red tinted scene, feet wiggle out of pits in the ground, as sinners are buried head first
--A real stand out: fortune tellers with their heads twisted around, walk backwards toward Dante and Virgil
--The poets encounter three giants, and one lifts them down from above.  This effect is quite nifty for its time.
--Embezzlers are transformed into vipers, where they ultimately become lizard puppets
--One man carries around his own severed head, which actually keeps talking!

--but my absolute favorite moment, where the soundtrack really shines, is when Lucifer munches on some poor soul, his feet dangling out of his mouth like some unruly piece of lettuce.  Check out the image at the very beginning of the post to get a master shot of Lucifer with his wings in the background.  Love it!!

Lucifer munching on a human body!

Sure, there were some moments in the screening where the audience emitted a mass chuckle as some of the special effects displayed a certain raw, dated quality.  My favorite is when Virgil and Dante escape the demons by jumping into a pit of snakes, and they just appear to be some random noodles laying around.  Still, those moments add a bit of lightness to a really compelling and imaginatively rendered Hell world, and to think that this film came out in 1911, well before the surrealists were making weirdness like Un Chien Andalou, is simply awesome!  I just barely made it into the screening, since it was utterly sold out, and I'm so glad I did.  L'Inferno with live accompaniment was truly a unique cinematic experience to remember.  Thank you, Fantasia!

The Hallow--Corin Hardy (2015)

Things lurk just beyond the door in The Hallow--Corin Hardy (2015)

Seeing a film in Concordia Hall at the Fantasia Film Festival is always an experience.  I got to the theater at 8:15pm for a 9:35pm showing, and there were still a significant number of people ahead of me.  After my ticket was taken, I rushed into the theater to find it already packed with VIPs, but I still got a pretty sweet seat.  The hall is so full of activity, voices raised in excitement and anticipation, it always reminds me, just a little bit, that I'm there on my own, notebook in hand.  Still, people are so damn welcoming, I always meet the coolest viewers.  A shout out to Daniel, one of the organizers at the festival, for letting me take a seat next to him, and immediately making me feel not so alone.  Once the lights go down and the meowing stops, screening films with such an enthusiastic crowd really is a treat.

As I mentioned in my earlier post about the films that I planned to see at Fantasia, The Hallow has a rich, fairytale quality, greatly impacted by the lush foliage of the Northern Irish woods.  And it has a baby-in-peril which is a really boring cliche to me, but I'll get to that.  The film immediately places the fight over natural resources into context as a couple head off into the woods while a radio broadcast debating the plundering of Ireland's forests is overheard on the soundtrack.  Adam Hitchens (Joseph Mawle--most recently in the Wachowski's Sense 8) has been hired to check out the quality of the trees that are going to be stripped and sold.  He's not happy about the reasons he's been sent out there, but it's his job, and somebody's got to do it.  He brings along his wife, Claire (Bojana Novakovic) and their newborn, Finn, to fulfill that "in peril" requirement.  Oh and a dog, too.  Unsurprisingly, the locals are not too happy about this "rape of the forest" and warn them with a great deal of drama that this place isn't London, and here, "things go bump in the night."  The most vehement neighbor is Roose Bolton...oops, I mean Colm Donnelly (Michael McElhatton).  I don't know if this actor will ever be able to get a sympathetic role again.  He plays a sh** here too, but one whose young daughter entered the woods and disappeared.  He warns the couple that bad things are going to happen to them, and he sure is right about that.

Adam plays with fire against the beasties

One of the things that drives me crazy about some horror movies is when characters do really, really dumb things that telegraph their stupidity from minute one.  I understand that Adam is going to bring his whole family along on this job, but you've got a newborn, dammit.  Things like medical help, working technology, and useful transportation are going to be prioritized.  The film does suggest that for all Adam's savvy about trees, and mold, and parasites, he's just a city boy on a "camping trip" and doesn't know what it's really like to be in nature.  When Adam and Claire aren't tromping around obliviously, they are ignoring all their neighbors' advice, even when a window gets broken and there seems to be suspicious slime everywhere.  Thankfully, they get clued in pretty quick when the action starts speeding up and the "demons" make their first appearance about mid-way through the film.  The demons are really, really ugly, animal-like predators, and yet they seem to be really smart as well--either that or singularly bent on the goal of stealing THEIR BABY, because scary fairies and changelings.  With this film, it's best to not spend too much time on logic; the plot is full of holes.

Claire tries to save Finn, a baby who will definitely need therapy if he survives

The strongest part of the film is the gorgeous Irish landscape providing an atmosphere reeking with dread.  Everything looks so pretty during the day, but the woods are also constantly filled with dark, sinister shadows.  The Yuck factor is incredibly potent and engaging as the black slime that seems to have infected the forest seeps into the house, and turns into sharp sentient talons that attack the protagonists.  A couple moments of "eye horror" were really intense (just saying).  The reasoning behind the attack is a little spotty, but I really appreciated the environmental message in the film, and one should stick around through the end credits to see how pointed Hardy makes that critique.  Adam's transformation from city-slicker know-it-all to something quite "different" feels a little stretched, and his surviving "humanity" seems really hard to believe in the film's final moments, especially as he's set up as pretty unreliable from the beginning.  Of course, Claire will do anything to save her baby, and that narrative is just so tired to me.  I really wanted the baby to become a little bundle of pure, powerful evil, but alas, that's a different film, I suppose.  Stay for the film's setting and sly message; slog through the horror cliches.

The short film Fantasia chose to screen with The Hallow, Colum Eastwood's The Morrigan (2015) was a perfect match, and, I liked it better than the feature for its elegance and forcefully concise storytelling.  A couple escape to a little house by the ocean for some intimate time (the film implies that the man is married to another woman) when a young girl shows up unconscious outside of their bungalow.  They help her and contact the local police.  When the locals show up, the innocent girl turns out to be not so innocent.  The Morrigan is a war goddess from Irish mythology--not really applicable here but for the folkloric elements.  Still, it accompanies, and perhaps outshines The Hallow, beautifully.  Both films capture the haunting quality of the Irish woods with style.