In what is easily the best selection yet for SFF’s hugely popular Freak Me Out section, the sidebar dedicated to all things weird, wild, and shocking, programmer Richard Kuipers has garnered an excellent looking array of confrontational nightmare movies. Seven features and an attack of the double feature!
From the dark corners of Bavaria comes German Angst, an anthology (very hip at the moment) featuring three short films from three of the country’s maverick shockmeisters; Jorg Buttgereit, Michal Kosakowski, and Andreas Marschall.
From neigbouring Austria is one of my most anticipated horrors of the year, Goodnight Mommy, combining elegance and grindhouse style to bizarre and nightmarish effect.
Three flicks from the US of A; Karyn (Girlfight) Kusama’s dark thriller The Invitation, from the producers of the superb The House of the Devil comes We Are Still Here, a haunted house number that echoes the atmospheric depths of Fulci. And from the directors of the excellent low-budget Resolution is their sophomore effort, Spring, a romance steeped in Lovecraftian dread.
New Zealand is currently enjoying a fantastic limelight in horror, and there are two in FMO: the comedy-horror metal extreme of Deathgasm, and the post-apocalyptic thrills and spills of Turbo Kid (a co-pro with Canada).
The double feature delight is none other than two of the great black and white horror movies of the 50s: Invasion of the Body Snatchers (a stone-cold classic of paranoia), and Them! (arguably the best of the plethora of post-war American nuclear-threats).
Also of note is Sunday June 7’s free Horror Tragic Talkfest upstairs at the festival Hub, with Richard Kuipers and Ant Timpson (executive producer on Deathgasm and Turbo Kid) going head-to-head on a freewheelin’ discussion about everything horror juicy.
