Hendrik Faller’s first feature film, Mountain Fever, is an official selection of Horror Channel’s Frightfest in London and will have its world premiere at the festival at the end of August, 2017.
The film is described as an “ice-cold survivalist thriller,” and the trailer suggests that it taps into home invasion and contagion sub-genres as well as the survivalist narrative.
Tom Miller plays an “incompetent Englishman” who is held hostage in his own home and forced to team up with his captor to fight off the survivors of a fatal flu epidemic.
Mountain Fever looks like a slow-burn film, driven by paranoia and dread. Check out the trailer:
MOUNTAIN FEVER from FrightFest on Vimeo.
I asked Faller what his favorite horror films are, since they can reveal a lot about a director’s style. Here’s what Faller says about his picks:
Dead End (Jean-Baptiste Andrea, 2003): It just reminds me that the horror genre can do so many things at the same time. It’s scary as hell but also kind of funny. At the same time it’s a mind-frak and it does a lot with a little; it’s basically just 5 people in a car.
Then comes the original Halloween (John Carpenter, 1978): I know that’s not very original but what I am really interested in is dread. An impending sense of doom is what gets me more than the actual climax. That’s what I love about Halloween. The body count is quite low, the gore isn’t out of this world either, but the build is fantastically scary and lasts the whole film. Mountain Fever is similar in that it’s all about the build. The gore comes in sharp and quick as the pin prick that pops the climax, but without the dread building to it the gore would do nothing.
Finally I love It Follows (David Robert Mitchell, 2014), even though I hate the end! Again just this idea of the scariest thing you can think of slowly creeping towards you. It’s going to take a long time to get you, but it will get you in the end.
Mountain Fever definitely looks like a film to watch out for!
