Given how remarkably strong this year’s Spooky Season kicked off with the one-two punch of The Sacrifice Game and When Evil Lurks (both of which played at this year’s Knoxville Horror Film Festival and Nashville Film Festival’s Graveyard Shift, with the former also doing duty as the closing-night film for this year’s Brooklyn Horror Film Festival), navigating the genre offerings that proliferate this fall was always going to be an interesting endeavor — especially given how scattershot the release patterns for horror in Nashville can be. So whether in theaters (or the sneaky one-night-only event screening model) or on the usual streaming suspects like Shudder, Screambox and Arrow, here are some of the highlights coming your way from this year’s Brooklyn Horror Film Festival (as well as the Knoxville Horror Film Festival and the Seattle Queer Film Festival).
Where the Devil Roams
The Irish film All You Need Is Death (BHFF) finds a fascinating path between the ethnographic drama of Songcatcher and pure, Lovecraftian folk horror, shifting form periodically and conveying the viewer to a gutsy end that couldn’t help but stick in the craw for days after the film ended. It’s easy to accept the existence of shunned artifacts and tomes, but it’s rare for a film to take the idea of a cursed song and fully explore what that would mean in the modern era. Similarly innovative is Where the Devil Roams (BHFF/KHFF, coming to Tubi), the latest from the polyhyphenate Adams Family, a period piece about a family of supernaturally afflicted carnies finding new pathways through life. Nothing else quite had the look of this film, like a burnished object kept in sackcloth and secrets, and John Adams and Toby Poser both deliver haunting performances that stick with you. Poser in particular makes you wish she and Jenette Goldstein could play sisters in something someday. If you’re in the mood for singular visual experiences, a new Bertrand Mandico (After Blue) film is reason for rejoicing, and She Is Conann (BHFF) is a wild lesbian fantasy epic with all the bloody battles, timeslipping travails and bloodlettings that you could want from an unofficial riff on the legendary barbarian Conan. Mandico excels in world building, and his vision of many earths here excels with equal parts James Bidgood and Panos Cosmatos imagination.
Birder
As found footage continues to evolve with seemingly each new technological leap that we take as a society, respect is due the makers of Frogman (KHFF), an Ohio-based piece of Hi8 nostalgia that builds on the legacy of a local cryptid and goes further with it than anyone could hope for, blending history, folklore and modern media appetite into a strikingly effective soak in creeping amphibious monstrosity. And when it comes to building upon the world around us with an eye for the chthonic and the teleological, I’ve got to shout out Gus Reed’s "Ringing Rocks" (BHFF/SQFF), one of the best shorts to surface this year. There are so many ideas and concepts lurking in this 17-minute marvel that I honestly trip out on whatever writer-director Reed decides to do next. You could call it a Palm Springs take on The Outwaters, but it’s a more subtle take even than that as it guts you all the same. It’s a triumph of vibe and lore and unease coalescing into something that pummels you from within, which you could also say about Birder (SQFF), a refreshingly explicit exercise in balancing tones that understands slasher thrills as well as it does Leo Bersani’s theory of the abject. On one side is a psychopathic pansexual birdwatcher, on the other is everybody else, and the setting is a Connecticut lakeside enclave. Maximum respect is due Michael Emery’s (literally) balls-out turn as the titular psycho birder, who screws and murders his way through the cast with a remarkable degree of efficiency. Imagine the psychological sandbox of Stranger by the Lake, but working through specifically American sexual identities and hang-ups. For a similarly sumptuous attitude toward queer sexuality but with less (or more specifically, no) murder, the documentary In the Meat Rack (SQFF) is a fun romp through the history of one of Fire Island’s most beloved cruising districts, albeit one that can’t help but delve into the fascinating history of both the island and the ways that authority has sought to curb such expressions.
The essential documentary on the genre side of the street is Satan Wants You (BHFF), a remarkable Canadian exploration of the global firestorm that arose after the 1980 publication of Michelle Remembers, a since-discredited document of the years of satanic ritual abuse that reportedly afflicted Michelle Smith back in the ’50s. Thankfully, the film is Canadian, as it would be impossible for an American documentary to approach the material with enough distance to really dig deep into the cultural damage that resulted from this one book. It is an infuriating and oddly captivating story that will certainly angry up the blood.
New York’s own saint of indie horror, Larry Fessenden, is back with two films. He produced Crumb Catcher (BHFF), a cringe comedy/home invasion film that I couldn’t stand but won an audience award, and his latest directorial effort, Blackout (BHFF), a smart and relevant werewolf drama grounded in a remarkable central performance from Alex Hurt as an artist/contractor caught up in some lycanthropic shenanigans. As Fessenden does when set loose with classic monster archetypes, he explores all manner of possibilities (even teasing what might could be if the wolfen rose against the billionaire class).
T Blockers
After running and ducking and dodging and jumping through hoops to try to see the new big trans genre epic (the one that’s been a source of consternation for over a year now) — something I’ve been trying to wrangle at three different festivals at this point — I instead got to check out T Blockers (BHFF), the new film from Alice Maio Mackay. She’s Australian, she's 19, she’s trans, and this is her third (of four) feature that she’s made in the past three years. Her slasher thinkpiece Bad Girl Boogey was the mood this summer, and T Blockers digs deep into The Faculty/Stepford Wives territory, but in the realm of toxic masculinity. Mackay makes angry, vibrant films that feel alive and messy and of the moment in a very Gregg Araki way, and I can’t wait to see her next film, Satranic Panic.
Much respect is also due the new 4K restoration of the 1973 classic Messiah of Evil from Radiance Films (BHFF), which really does an incredible job at remaining true to ’70s film stock and color saturation while making the visual presentation feel truer to itself than its previous legacy on home video has ever presented it. Also due respect, oddly enough, is the film version of Five Nights at Freddy’s (in theaters now and streaming on Peacock). I knew nothing of its video game empire other than “Chuck E. Cheese, but evil,” but I wasn’t expecting the intricate (some would say overwrought, but if you’re going to give an audience some mythos, let it be baroque and excessive) psychological space it operates in. Real talk: A lot of it feels like an Elm Street sequel, and you’ve got to respect a film about menacing animatronics that casts Mary Stuart Masterson (whose first film was 1975’s The Stepford Wives). But I could forgive all its easy tropes and sweaty narrative choices for the animatronic cupcake that eats people’s faces and incarnates nothing but pure rage — only a cupcake could have such purity of purpose.
For further genre-adjacent coverage, tune in next month for coverage of the 2023 New York Film Festival and NewFest, where you’ll hear about Aggro Dr1ft, All of Us Strangers, The Beast, Bleat, Poor Things, The Strangler and The Sweet East.
