Summoners had its world première at Brooklyn Horror Film Festival “Just feeling nostalgic,” Jess Whitman (Christine Nyland) tells a librarian (Margaret Reed), explaining why she is sat on the library floor rereading an old book. Nostalgia is key to Terence Krey’s Summoners, co-written and co-produced with Nyland, in which Jess returns for the first…
Isolation has its world première at FrightFest 2021 Conceived by Nathan Crooker, Isolation is a nine-part anthology film whose episodes were made in different parts of the world – mostly in or around American cities, but also taking excursions further (e.g. London in Alix Austin and Keir Stewart’s It’s Inside) – during a global pandemic…
Clapboard Jungle: Surviving the Independent Film Business first published by Through the Trees “It’s been said that there are three things you should never do when making a film: make a film about yourself; make a film about filmmaking; or open the film with a quote.” So says Canadian filmmaker Justin McConnell at the beginning…
Much as genre producer Travis Stevens’ feature debut, the haunted house movie Girl On The Third Floor (2019), exposed the toxic masculinity at the heart – and in the very architecture – of the American home, so too his follow-up Jakob’s Wife continues this gendered (and genre’d) preoccupation with domestic relations. The very title of…
The dread comes early in Dementer. Opening with a psychedelic barrage of panicky snatches from an impressionistic sequence of events (a bonfire, a barking dog, a naked woman fleeing a vehicle, a grey-haired figure groping about in a room), all choreographed to the sound of a menacing male voice counting up to 13, and to the…
Horror gets real: the limits of fantasy at Arrow Video FrightFest 2019 first published by Sight & Sound Includes capsules of: Come to Daddy; A Good Woman Is Hard To Find; Fingers; Rock, Paper and Scissors; Red Letter Day; True Fiction; Feedback; Criminal Audition; Why Don’t You Just Die!; Knives and Skin FrightFest ran from…
Wendy and Lucy first published by EyeforFilm “I’m lost”. They are the words that Wendy (Michelle Williams) writes on makeshift posters, alongside a picture of her missing dog Lucy – and they are words that apply equally to herself, and more broadly, to America’s dispossessed underclass. En route from Indiana to Alaska hoping to get…
Bliss introduces us to the crumbling world and fragmenting headspace of Dezzy Donohue (Dora Madison). A Californian artist who has run out of creative juice, Dezzy has twice asked for extensions on her latest commission, and is getting nowhere with it. David (Chris McKenna), her agent of long standing, can see the writing (if not…
It was 20 years ago today… past, present and future in Arrow Video FrightFest 2019 Hindsight is 20/20. Nobody could have known, way back when Audition was programmed as part of the inaugural edition of FrightFest in the year 2000, how forward-looking a selection this would prove to be. For, apart from being a film…
The Ranger first published by SciFiNow ‘First-time feature director’ can be a loaded term. It often implies inexperience – yet Jenn Wexler has not only written, directed and produced two short films (Slumber Party, 2012 and Halloween Bash, 2013), but also produced several stylistically and thematically arresting indie titles by other directors, like Mickey Keating’s Darling…
Depraved had its world première at on 20th March, 2019 at What the Fest!? “You’re so pale. What are you, like a vampire or something?” This is what, a good way into Depraved, Shelley (Addison Timlin) asks the taciturn, heavily scarred stranger (Adam Breaux) with whom she has started drinking in a South Brooklyn bar. Shelley…