Horrible Imaginings Film Festival: Smiley Face Killers (2020)

Directed by: Tim Hunter

Notable cast: Ronen Rubinstein, Mia Serafino, Amadeus Serafini, Crispin Glover

 

From the nineties through the early aughts there were a series of drownings of young men throughout the Midwest, and upon noticing a pattern of smiley face graffiti accompanying these tragic deaths, a few law enforcement experts, including two detectives, put forward a theory that these were serial murders. This has been shot down and ridiculed by the crime-fighting community writ large, but the basic idea of this inspired this thriller from director Tim Hunter and the mind of writer Bret Easton Ellis (Less Than Zero, American Psycho). If you’re familiar with Ellis’ work, broadly, a good portion of this movie feels very in line with his vision of the world. Young, upper-middle-class men and their many social struggles. His characters are, almost by definition, hard to relate to, which makes for a tough sell in what is ostensibly a slasher movie or, at the very least, a film styled as one.

 

Horrible Imaginings Film Festival: The Return (2020)

Directed by: BJ Verot

Notable cast: Richard Harmon, Echo Porisky, Marina Stephenson, Sara Thompson

Haunted house movies are one of the, if not the, oldest and most venerated sub-genres in the entirety of horror. From The Amityville Horror to Poltergeist, House On Haunted Hill to Paranormal Activity and everywhere in between. The hardest part of one of these movies at this point is doing anything even remotely interesting with them. The trouble with being the original effects genre is that you literally have to reinvent the wheel over and over again in order for it to be effective. Or, more simply, when you see someone looking in a bathroom mirror, you know the next beat is going to be some horrid specter staring out of the mirror as soon as the room vacates. Some of these scares are so completely ubiquitous you can see some variation at the haunted house your neighbor down the block throws together every year. It’s the reason The Return comes as such a pleasant surprise. It feels like a legitimately fresh take and marks an exceptionally auspicious feature film debut for Canadian director BJ Verot.

 

Horrible Imaginings Film Festival: Luz: the Flower of Evil (2020)

Directed by: Juan Diego Escobar Alzate

Notable cast: Conrado Osorio, Andrea Esquival, Yuri Vargas, Sharon Guzman

 

There is a dreamlike quality to Luz: The Flower of Evil that many films aspire to and never quite achieve. In the effortless fashion of a David Lynch or Jodorowsky, Luz creates a world with internal, consistent logic that is both horribly familiar and terrifyingly alien. Every frame of it looks like an oil painting, like a sort of perverse lost Norman Rockwell “Hidden Columbian Religious Cult” collection. It’s almost hard to even call Luz a horror movie in a modern sense of the term, as it owes more to something like the original Wicker Man or The Holy Mountain than anything even close to a slasher movie. It means that it evokes a different kind of horror, something existential.

 

Horrible Imaginings Film Festival: Dead (2020)

Directed by: Hayden J Weal

Notable cast: Tom Sainsbury, Hayden J Weal, Jennifer Ward-Leland

 

Horror and comedy work well together because of a similar sense of pace and revelation. A dependence on surprise. They, whoever “they” are, even say that laughter is actually a type of expression of fear, our minds reacting to unexpected stimulation. A common route is the inherent violence of slapstick or an extreme childish humor, an effort to offset what’s happening on screen. New Zealand horror comedy Dead goes a different way, with light, character-based and situational comedy. It’s a refreshing mood and an interesting take on the otherwise fairly well-tread territory.

 

Marbles (writer Tom Sainsbury) is a low energy stoner making ends meet as a spirit medium, helping people’s loved ones communicate any final messages and pass on. This is presented immediately and factually, as Marbles takes a mysterious injection that grants the ability, and the film admirably wastes no time on any kind of dull subplot doubting his power. After one such session, he finds himself stalked by the ghost of an uptight cop, Tagg (Director Hayden J Weal, Love And Time Travel) who demands Marbles solve his murder, the seventh in a serial murder spree. After Marbles’ mother indicates she’s selling the house he grew up in, a home with memories tied to his recently departed father, he decides to help Tagg in hopes of reward, enough to buy his home outright.

 

Horrible Imaginings Film Festival: The Brain That Wouldn't Die (2020)

Directed by: Derek Carl

Notable Cast: Rachael Perrell Fosket, Patrick D. Green, David Withers, Robert Blanche

 

Remakes are a tricky business at the best of times. You have to respect the original material, and try to put a spin on it to justify retreading the territory. That second part is more vital than it may appear on the surface, and luckily we have Gus Van Sant’s Psycho as shorthand that spares further explanation. The genre of the fifties and sixties sci-fi horror has been a fertile ground for remakes with its combination of earnest (if over the top) acting, high concept (if silly) stories, and low budget cheesy special effects. The Brain That Wouldn’t Die was certainly ripe for a new take, and freshman director Derek Carl puts his passion for the original on display in a satire on the era that maintains the existential dread Inherent to the concept.