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Shudder Speed: Fantasia International Film Festival 2024
John Adams in Hell Hole (courtesy of Shudder) The largest genre film festival in North America, Montréal’s ever-growing Fantasia International Film Festival celebrated its 28th edition this summer. This was my seventh year covering for Filmmaker, my ninth in attendance and I arrived with a severe case of FOMO: at an industry party last year, I met a man dressed head-to-toe in a gigantic beaver costume, allegedly to promote a feature he had at the festival. He was charming, so I told him I’d make an effort to see Hundreds of Beavers, but a part of me, taken aback by the man’s zany attire and commitment to self-promotion, knew I wouldn’t necessarily prioritize it. The joke was on me: the film went on to become one of the few recent success stories in the world of independent film. One more confession: on a Monday evening during the 2022 edition of the festival, I grew tired and went to bed early, missing the world premiere of a lo-fi horror film with a title that sounded like a kiddie nursery rhyme; the film would become one of the horror genre’s biggest word-of-mouth hits the following year. I arrived determined to not let another breakout success story pass me by.
That goal wasn’t easy, thanks in large part to the programming overseen by artistic director Mitch Davis (as much of a public face as the festival has). As Fantasia continues to expand, so too does the workload of its employees. Last year, with news of the festival staff’s wish to unionize hitting the trades, I wrote that “strikes and talks of a ‘hot labor summer’ were still top of mind, not least due to news that the festival’s own workers were operating under untenable conditions; to the leadership’s credit, unionization appears imminent.” Another sign of my being unable to predict the near future: this year’s festival was at risk of disruption before it even began. Although unionization did take place following the 2023 edition, approximately 60 members went on strike ahead of this year’s festival for a slew of reasons before quickly arriving at their first collective bargaining agreement with the festival’s top brass and preventing a delay in this year’s festivities. It’s always reassuring to see a conflict such as this get resolved swiftly, even as the amount of work behind the scenes to even get to this agreement was surely an arduous uphill climb.
While the worldwide public was consumed by Montréal native Shawn Levy’s newest Marvel blockbuster, the city was welcoming less corporately manufactured moving images. Rita, from Guatemalan filmmaker Jayro Bustamante, dramatizes the horrific sexual abuse that transpired in the 2010s at an orphanage in San José Pinula, culminating in a revolt and indoor fire that took the lives of 41 girls. Bustamante’s film uses magical realism to show how these young women used imagination to band together in the face of insurmountable tragedy. The film screened in the festival’s Cheval Noir Competition section and DP Inti Briones was awarded Best Cinematography, his use of expressionistic shadows and natural lighting most fully realized in scenes where the title character pleads for help from the only adult who gives her the time of day. Many of the girls were beaten and raped by orphanage staff before being auctioned online and trafficked; dividing the girls’ social stratification into angels and princesses and fairies, Rita is a grim J. M. Barrie fairy tale that appropriately concludes with the dedication: “In honor of all the fantastic beings that inhabit an adult world that turns its back on them.” And while his previous feature, La Llorona, was selected as Guatemala’s submission for Best International Feature at the Academy Awards, Bustamante will most likely not receive the same honor for Rita, as the country by and large refuses to acknowledge the 2017 tragedy or blames the victims for being nothing more than deviants whose deaths were no great loss. The film will premiere on AMC’s horror streaming service Shudder this November.
Another award winner in the Cheval Noir Competition section (Outstanding Performance for its two leads, Berik Aitzhanov and Anna Starchenko) was Kazakh filmmaker Adilkhan Yerzhanov’s Steppenwolf, a bloodsoaked dystopian drama described in Mitch Davis’s festival catalogue blurb as “a Kazakh Mad Max directed by John Ford (or perhaps, The Searchers directed by George Miller).” This is true of both the narrative—a gruff man goes rogue to rescue an abducted child—and form, right down to the iconic doorway shot from The Searchers being shamelessly replicated. Less John Wayne than John Wayne Gacy, Brajyuk (Aitzhanov) is a psychotic killer who is nonetheless effective at his job, butchering anyone who stands in his way of rescuing the small son of an almost-mute, shell-shocked mother (Starchenko). No hint of a romance develops between the two leads; if anything, Western audiences might be taken aback by the physical abuse Brajyuk lays on the young lady to further illustrate his “doesn’t play well with others” reputation. Had it been released 20 years ago, Steppenwolf would unquestionably sport a “Quentin Tarantino Presents” label above its title, its style and over-the-top brutality (supporting characters here are less likely to catch a common cold than a bullet) entertaining in a macabre sort of way. The film never breaks out from its pre-determined destination, going from point A to point B in a satisfying if familiar manner.
A less straightforward narrative was displayed in Matthew Fifer’s Haze , which debuts on Shudder later this year. A small upstate New York town was once rocked by the suicides of eight gay men in a now-defunct psychiatric hospital; just what type of conversion experiments took place there (and why) are just a few of the questions the lead character (Cole Doman of Henry Gamble’s Birthday Party) seeks to uncover, as well as why the hospital’s former employees have recently been turning up dead. With echoes of Alain Guiraudie’s Stranger by the Lake, William Friedkin’s Cruising and, by film’s end, Roman Polanski’s The Tenant, Haze is occasionally too abstract for its own good but is certainly more complex than its title, a homophone that calls to mind the Hays Production Code that, among other things, censored any motion picture content deemed sexually perverse.
On the more conventional horror front, I saw the world premiere of Chuck Russell’s Witchboard, a low-budget remake (still seeking distribution) of Kevin Tenney’s 1987 haunted Quija board film, which has developed a cult following over the years. I spoke with Russell about it here.) I also caught up with the latest from the Adams family, an actual group of blood relatives who also happen to be a filmmaking collective (daughter Zelda has taken a sabbatical from the DIY unit to attend Columbia University). And while I can admire their scrappy spirit and warts-and-all approach, Hell Hole (by my count either a double or triple entendre) was too goofy for me. The first horror film I’ve seen that involves fracking as a means to awakening the evil beneath the surface, Hell Hole places us in Serbia, where a dim U.S. fracking unit discovers a living organism in the Earth they can’t identify. What they can identify is the French Napoleonic soldier from the 1800s they’ve also dug up who’s been embalmed in the soil—somehow preserved, still alive and carrying a creature inside of him that’s looking for its next host. With obvious inspirations including John Carpenter’s remake of The Thing and Lawrence Kasdan’s Dreamcatcher—much like that goofy, appropriately forgotten film, the demonic mollusk often makes its way into the human body via where the sun don’t shine—Hell Hole isn’t meant to be original, but the lame jokes, shoddy special effects (often visibly computer-generated), and amateur performances (including by the directors themselves) leave much to be desired. I admire a family that can sit down for a meal, much less produce, write, and direct a film together—but this effort (which recently premiered on, you guessed it, Shudder) would’ve benefited from either being dumber or more deranged.
On the nonfiction front, I caught the North American premiere of Javier Horcajada’s From My Cold Dead Hands, a 65-minute documentary made up entirely of YouTube videos of gun-loving Americans fetishizing their favorite firearms. Accelerating Chekov’s guidance that “If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired,” Horcajada’s film doesn’t make viewers wait that long. While it should come as no surprise that the majority of Americans who upload videos of themselves blasting rounds of ammunition at random objects aren’t bashful about their gun adoration, and while it’s also not a surprise that these folks are in no way in favor of gun control, it’s still slightly shocking to see how brazen they are in their disregard for public safety. Structuring itself around a YouTube video in which two men list step by step why someone would want to become a gun owner, Horcajada’s film incorporates a rabbit-hole of incendiary user-uploaded footage that works as a counterpoint to each of the men’s reasons.
The film makes clear that gun owners love reloading their magazines, performing fellatio on their guns, sticking dildos in their guns, laying strips of bacon atop their guns until they’re properly cooked by the heat generated after shooting off a few rounds in their guns, firing guns on tops of military tanks, having their young children play with guns and star in commercials for the sale of said guns at their locally-owned gun shops, and on and on. Does gun culture instinctually signal fear and weakness? Is there something pathetically sexual about firearms? Your hypothesis is a good as any, and even if Horcajada’s film isn’t likely to convert diehard 2nd-Amendment lovers into trading in their bayonets for books (unless, the film makes clear, it’s the good Lord’s Bible), From My Cold Dead Hands is an equally funny and disturbing sampling of extremism.
The newly restored repertory titles that get programmed at Fantasia, beginning a modest festival run in anticipation of a home video release down the line, are always worth seeking out. The 4K restoration of Christina Hornisher’s sole directorial effort, Hollywood 90028, made its Canadian premiere in the Fantasia Retro section. Shot in 1973 and destined for the second-half of a drive-in double bill, Hornisher’s feature is fascinating in how its genre elements and body count take an almost complete backseat to a damning depiction of Los Angeles as a place where transplants’ dreams go to die. A loner from the Midwest (Christopher Augustine) works as a cinematographer in L.A, shooting low-budget skin flicks by day and picking up and murdering women he takes an interest in by night. While there’s nothing particularly form-busting about a serial killer mirroring as a well-adjusted man about town, Hornisher isn’t much interested in the offings (always carried out via strangulation), which are presented as a side effect triggered by a traumatic experience the killer had in his youth—a sticking point communicated via a series of still photographs in the film’s efficient opening credits.
The kills don’t take up more than ten percent of the film’s total runtime; Hollywood 90028 spends the majority of its 90 minutes following the killer as he strolls past elaborate painted murals, takes photos of the lions and tigers at a local zoo, interviews for a job filming exteriors for a quickly approaching Hollywood shoot, and, in the film’s most strangely affecting sequence, visits Bunker Hill with a pornographic actress he’s taken a liking to, ranting about how real estate greed is pushing out the lifers and robbing the city of its quickly disappearing history; the woman will later reciprocate her gentleman caller’s pessimism with an equally sad monologue about how girls like her increasingly fall victim to the porn industry. These bleak conversations, so much more than padding to provide a grindhouse movie with an unearned shred of gravitas, feel pulled from lived experience. Murder and degradation are side effects of the city’s decay, not causes, and in the film’s final shot, the man turns the camera on himself and committs suicide by hanging from the Y of the iconic HOLLYWOOD sign, the camera pulling further and further back in an uninterrupted take until we’re above the Capitol Records Tower and the man is nothing more than an undistinguishable speck, destined to be forgotten when the shot finally fades to black.
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