Invoking Yell has its international première at Panic Fest 2023 One of the disparate story strands in Patricio Valladares’ Covid-curtailed, inchoate sci-fi Embryo (2020) involved a music video shoot gone awry in the Chilean backwoods – and with Invoking Yell, Valladares, working with his regular co-writer Barry Keating, revives this basic premise, while confounding the viewer’s sense of genre. This ambiguity of genre is…
Nightworld first published by SciFiNow Director Patricio Valladares is no stranger to FrightFest. His Hidden in the Woods (2012) – which he shot in his native Chile and then remade two years later in English – outraged some and delighted others with its shock tactics and constant lapses of taste, in a festival which many…
Chilean writer/director Patricio Valladares first rose to notoriety with Hidden in the Woods (2012), a shocking, disorientingly funny compendium of grindhouse gestures and motifs claiming (hilariously) to be based on real events. Yet before he made this – let alone before he remade it in English – Valladares already had four low-budget features (and a…
“I called because I wanted to tell you that I’m going to kill them. Every last one of them.” Chilean director Patricio Valladares’ short film Snowdevil presents itself as a dialogue – or several, in fact. We hear a phone conversation between caller Alan Massy and the increasingly alarmed emergency services operator (voiced by Jeannine…
An embryo is the collection of cells making up an organism before it is ready to be born or hatched – and the term is sometimes used, by a metaphorical extension, to refer to a rudimentary or beginning stage. So while the title of Patricio Valladares’ low-budget sci-fi horror might be taken to refer to…
First published by VODzilla.co “Acid’s beautiful, isn’t it?” These are the first words heard (or misheard) in Downhill, after an aerial reveals woodlands below – and they are followed by images of a distressed woman tied to a makeshift altar and being force-fed a live centipede-like creature by a robed priestess who reassures her, “You…