Icelandic-born director Erlingur Óttar Thoroddsen created something of a sensation with his 2012 horror short, Child Eater. He has now turned the short into a feature film, and it screened for the first time at the Brooklyn Horror Film Festival on Sunday October 16.
The original short is pretty amazing, and you can watch it on Vimeo:
Dearest Sister (Nong Hak) is the second feature film directed by Mattie Do, and it has some similarities to her first film, Chanthaly (2013)—not least its pervasive sense that hauntings happen most often in our closest relationships. Do, who was born in Los Angeles to parents who immigrated from Laos, is making a name for herself as the first female director of a Lao feature film and the first director of a horror film (Chanthaly) written and directed entirely in Laos. Dearest Sister was also produced in Laos, filmed on location in the capital city of Vientiane, where Do was living. As important, though, as Do’s films unquestionably are for Lao film-making, Dearest Sister is an exceptional horror film by the standards of any national cinema. Read more
Under the Shadow marks the directorial and writing debut of Iranian-born Babak Anvari. Having screened at film festivals in mid-2016 (the film notably won best film prize at the Neuchâtel International Fantastic Film Festival), Under the Shadow opened in select theaters and on VOD on October 7. Netflix has acquired the rights to the film, so it will eventually be even more widely available. And that’s a very good thing because Under the Shadow is one of the best independent horror films released in the last few years—in the company of The Babadook (Jennifer Kent, 2014), It Follows (David Robert Mitchell, 2014), and The Invitation (Karyn Kusama, 2015).
One of the films I am most excited about screening at the upcoming Brooklyn Horror Festival (October 14-16) is the 2016 French documentary directed by Fabien Delage called Fury of the Demon (La Rage du Démon). This is how IMDb describes the film:
“A documentary investigation on the rarest and most controversial French movie in the history of early cinema: a fascinating, lost and dangerous short film which causes violent reactions to those who watch it.” Read more
In Murray Leeder’s provocative short book Halloween, published in 2014 as part of the Devil’s Advocates series, he points out that for “a film called Halloween, there is remarkably little trick or treating depicted in it” (57). Leeder mentions two moments relatively early in the film in which Laurie (Jamie Lee Curtis) does see trick-or-treaters—as she is walking to her house after school and then after she has left her house to wait for Annie (Nancy Kyes) on a street corner. As Leeder points out, the first instance, in which Laurie stands poised to go into her house, evokes a kind of nostalgia for childhood (57). Laurie says, wistfully, “Well, kiddo, I thought you outgrew superstition,” looking at the costumed children, who are laughing, clearly identifiable as children and walking with an unmasked adult.
The second instance is slightly more tense; to quote Leeder, “the anxious cutting introduces an element of menace that is echoed in the uneasy look on Laurie’s face, since she is now becoming more attentive to Michael’s presence in Haddonfield” (57). Read more
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