Revisit the deep-seated fears and anxieties of the 1970′s in Scarfolk
Do you dream of traveling beyond everyday life to exotic locations? Would your ideal vacation include a time-travel option as well? If you are looking for a quirky and unusual destination, consider a visit to Scarfolk.
With the click of a mouse, you can access the strange and compelling village of Scarfolk, a small town located somewhere in the north-west of England which has become stuck in time, specially in the 1970’s.
Richard Littler is the self-appointed town mayor and, as designer and writer of the website, he presents the town’s artifacts for consideration. Through a spot-on series of public announcements and advertisements, the viewer becomes fully aware of the dangers that lurk seemingly everywhere in this quiet little hamlet. From the consequences of not learning to swim or speeding to the threat of imposter parents or thought-detector vans, these PSA’s succeed in capturing the low-level worry and daily trauma that pervaded the culture.
The fonts and graphics found in the Scarfolk documents are both cheery and eerily familiar, like those Earthshoes hidden in the back of your closet or that photo of your father in a leisure suit. The content shimmers with the haunting, dark humor we’ve come to expect from the British, reminiscent of the cringe-inducing bits of ”Monty Python’s Flying Circus” and the mock-educational series Look Around You.
After the publication of her short story“The Lottery” in 1948, Shirley Jackson noted that, in addition to hate mail, she received requests for more information, specifically on the location of towns that engaged in these practices. Some people wanted to visit those places and observe the local rites. The village of Scarfolk is frightening in a different way, and now that the archives are being made public, we can visit often and marvel at how far we have come– hopefully.
Best Date Ever–Face Casting at StudioFX101
– by Elsa L.
What makes for a memorable date experience? For me, the best dates are unique, perhaps extravagant and indulgent outings, where I get to experience new sensations while bathed in the attentions of my loved one and possibly attendants. The very best dates conclude with baubles or other memorabilia that recall the outing so I can savor it repeatedly.
Last Saturday, my Beloved Doktor took me to Studio FX 101 in Troy, MI where we spent the day in a spa for special effects. To remind me of the experience, I left with not only a plaster cast of my face but a silicone mold with which I can make many more. I will replay this date for a long time to come.
When my beloved Doktor asked me to participate in this experiment, I mean, date, I agreed without hesitation. We are both fans of the show Face Off, and I knew he’d extensively researched the processes involved. I prefer an experienced partner when seeking new experiences. We were greeted by Nick and Mark, the enthusiastic and personable owners of Studio FX 101, upon our arrival and welcomed with coffee and bagels before getting down to business. The shop is bright and tidy, and the team rigorously follows safety measures which made me relax thoroughly and enjoy the day. A skin test with the products assured me there’d be no adverse reactions, and a thorough presentation of the procedures let me know exactly what to expect.
My beloved Doktor could barely contain his enthusiasm. Grinning somewhat uncharacteristically with that newly shaven face, he was hardly recognizable– even to me. The Doktor volunteered to go first into the “hot seat,” or as I can verify from personal experience, the “cool-and-oozy-then-warm-and-heavy seat.” He was swathed in plastic, and his hair, eyebrows and eyelashes were covered with thick cream conditioner.
Then I got to pour mold compound down the sides of his head and over his face. Nick made sure the nostrils were kept free. Suffocation can so ruin the romantic mood, I find. Alga-Safe starts out only slightly thicker than milk but almost immediately, the liquid transforms into increasingly thicker versions of itself.
We used our hands to move it around my sweetheart’s face covering the entire surface and scooping the dripping substance from his chest back up to the top. Do note: the human nose is ingeniously designed for this activity. Drips naturally cascaded around the nostrils.
After the Alga-safe set up, we applied medical grade plaster-laced bandages over his now unrecognizable visage. Once the plaster cured — a mere 10 minutes at most– we gently freed him from his cocoon.
As he cleaned up, our instructor mixed up plaster and filled the mold. Soon enough we were admiring the resulting cast.
After a pizza lunch, it was my turn. My eyes were closed through the process which heightend my other senses. The alginate running down my face was the first bizarre sensation; it felt really cold!
I had wanted to maintain a slight, enigmatic smile for posterity but I lost track of that idea pretty quickly. For a few minutes, I was strangely occupied with keeping my eyes closed. Very soon, however, the weight of the alginate made it clear that opening my eyes accidently wasn’t possible.
In preparation, we’d learned a few hand signals which I used in response to questions, and I also had a pad and pen where I conveyed my concerns such as when my nose felt runny. I wanted to blow out hard but I didn’t want to puff crudely into an unseen face.
I also was concerned about my ear getting covered, but the instructor assured me that my orifices were safe. While my mold cured around my face, my beloved murmured reassuringly and the time passed fairly quickly.
When the mold was removed, it felt like getting a really intense facial treatment! My eyes felt somewhat sensitive to light for a few minutes, and my hair was, frankly, kind of disgusting. The heavy coat of conditioning cream that kept the alginate from sticking wasn’t all that difficult with soap and water in the utility sink.
Once the mold was complete, it was time to cast my plaster double. A handle was added to the curing plaster to made it easier to pull from the mold as well as to carry and display.
As an unexpected bonus, we were able to make silicone molds of our plaster faces. The Alga-safe used for the initial mold is somewhat fragile and capable of making only a couple casts. Silicone is far more durable and allows the opportunity for multiple casts in a wide variety of materials. Silicone is a two part material and we added a bit of color too, blue for the Doktor, red for me. Before we applied the first layer, the mixed silcone went into a vacuum that sucked out any air bubbles that would create pinholes in the cast. Then we poured on the first layer.
The first coat of silicone looked particularly cool over the plaster faces.
After the third layer of silicone and the hard plaster “mother” mold we made around it cured, we demolded our faces.
You might ask what a girl would do with a plaster cast of her face. The best date I had last year with the Good Doktor was to Theatre Bizarre. Though we were adequately costumed, we want to up our game for this year. A plaster cast of our faces will allow us to make form fitting masks and prosthetics that fit far better than any off the shelf false face. StudioFX101 offers sculpting sessions for just this kind of custom creature-making.
My plaster face sits on my dining room table, a memento of an unforgettable date, and every time I walk past it, I imagine the fantastic, personalized mask I’ll make using it. And sometimes, I think of the fun I’ll have with the Good Doktor this year at Theatre Bizarre and at numerous conventions where cosplay is encouraged. The VERY best dates are the ones that lead to MORE remarkable dates.
Skull Studded Wedding Cake
Lot’s of marriage vows use the phrase “Til Death Us Do Part” but that usually gets underplayed at the reception… not with this cake, festooned as it is with skulls. I’ve linked to this wonderful shock-food site previously and it’s becoming one of my regular haunts.
EvilCakeHead.com is on the forefront of what I take to be an innovation in contemporary art. Dada took aim at the institution of high art with its timeless masterpieces. Performance art was one, rather rarified and boring, result. Works that are edible yet aesthetic masterpieces accents the transient, time-bound nature of reality while celebrating that impermanence. With Cake! I find these “dark” themed cakes particularly poignant. They are a memento mori that is joyous, rather than brooding.
And of course, they’re just cool as all hell, ain’t they?
Cool Stuff: SpeedCult Detroit Metal Goods
Eyegor, Elsa and I strolled the ever-amusing Rustbelt Artists Market in fashionable Ferndale yesterday and I stumbled upon SpeedCult Detroit. Where have they been all my life? I remarked to the statuesque Betty Page behind the counter that it’s like a candy story for grownups, or at least grown up guys who are fond of wrenches, machine oil and speed. The stall presented a bewildering variety of precision cut steel, sporting logos for bands and instruments, tikis and zombies, devil-girls and man-caves and of course, hot-rods and stock cars. I particularly liked the firepit ringed as it was with pitch-fork cuties and stylized flames but I walked away with a Skull and Bones and a Beware notice for the toolshed. The photos don’t give adequte sense of scale but these chunks of awesome are about a foot across. The raw metal pieces run $10 a pound but other pieces are polished and powder coated in lusciously lurid colors. If we hadn’t been heading over to One-Eyed Betty’s to eat, I would have weighed myself down with a wrench rack. I suspect I’ll be purchasing many more items now I know my heart’s desires exist in 1/8 inch steel.
SpeedCult is at the RustBelt every weekend but also ship their goodies from their webstore. If you hit their website, check out the NatGeo video about SpeedCult “amusement park.” They seem like fun folks!
Confusion 2013 – Immortal Fun
Elsa and I hit Immortal Confusion 2013 last weekend and had a blast. A high point for the DailyNightmare horror-snobs was probably the 7 foot tall statue of Lord Cthulu that graced the Great Room. It’s likeness also adorned the badges. I didn’t dare touch it for fear of dispelling the illusion but its patina resembled lightly aged bronze.
There were plenty of intriguing and informative panels on speculative fiction as per usual. Some topics like “The Old Evil” surely bumped up against horror, though folks tended to use the up-market phrase “dark fantasy.” Potayto-potahto, IMHO.
When we left, our arms were laded with books and faces were beaming with smiles.
Flint Horror Convention – October 20th
If you read this blog and you’re near mid-Michigan next weekend, stop in to the Second Annual Flint Horror Convention, right down town at the creepy Masonic Temple kitty corner from the original Halo Burger. Vendors, Movies, Panels and all so close to the center of this mitten-shaped wonderland. TV horror celebrity Wolfman Mac is playing host and, among many other guests, my friends from the Great Lakes Association of Horror Writers will be on a panel. Last year’s inaugural convention was a blast and this year promises to be bigger and better.
Theatre Bizarre – October 20th
Guess what arrived in the mail? Yes, oh yes, passes for this year’s version of Theatre Bizarre, titled “The Summoning.” The lurid festivities will be held at the Detroit Masonic Temple and please note, costumes are MANDATORY. I am taking time off from stitching mine to type out this posting.
If you aren’t hip to Theatre Bizarre — and there’s no shame really — check out the video I made of some of their side show props at the 2011 Detroit Maker Faire. Remember: you have been SUMMONED.
“Darkness and Dawn” – a vintage “Hell House”
It’s October and officially the time for Haunted House attractions and their evangelical knock-offs known as Hell Houses. A Hell House takes the thrills and chills of a traditional haunted house but dresses them up with a heavily moralistic and pietistic spin. A common feature, I gather, is a lurid depiction of Hell and all the tortures awaiting immoral, impious folks. This phenomenon is nothing new, heck some of the best medieval plays are thinly veiled cautionary tales. But I was charmed to find a post about a midway attraction from the early decades of the 20th C named “Darkness and Dawn” that featured a peek into Hell, presumably for pure amusement not instruction.
The first reference I found came from the blog Anonymous Works that featured a ticket for this attraction plus a snippet of information. They noted the attraction was located in Coney Island, that is burned down in 1903 and was later re-built in Luna Park. The style of the attraction was a cyclorama, a circular panorama intended to give a sense of all encompassing vista.
The blog Gaping Media Hole had several postcards from the attraction’s appearance in different locations, including the promotional card shown above and the shot of the midway that shows the front of the attraction. The locations noted are Revere Beach and Venice Beach.
The best description about the attraction came at a site devoted to the Pan-American Exhibition of 1901 held in Buffalo, NY. If I read the information correctly, “Darkness and Dawn” grossed the highest amount of any of the Midway attractions, scoring 17th overall behind restaurants and concession stands. The attraction started with a “Cabaret du Mort” where patrons drank from skulls and sat at coffin-shaped tables. Likely these beverages were alcoholic since at this time, amusement parks were aimed at young couples and were not particularly family friendly. I found little description of the Hell portion other than the note that while the creator of the attraction was puzzling out a way to get patrons over a lake of fire he came up with the idea for another attraction, “Visit to the Moon.”
These were the details I was able to piece together with a few minutes of research. I’m sharing them here mostly to remind myself to look into it further when I get a chance. Suffice to say, our interest in fear as thrill is sometimes served with a candy coating of instruction, and sometimes that candy coating is quite thin.
“Better to Reign in Hell than Serve in Heaven…”
Elsa got me fairly ADDICTED to this cute, quirky on-line game called Glitch. You do all sorts of weird stuff like milk butterflies to make butter and later, cheese or squeeze chickens to get grain. Even the pigs will let you nibble on them if you pet them first. It’s certainly WEIRD but perhaps not exactly DailyNightmare material…
…with the exception of, well, Hell. If you let your energy levels slip to zero, you go to Hell. But Hell is not all that bad. You can earn your way out by squishing Hell grapes and if you find your way to the end of Hell, there’s even a bar! He’re a shot of my Glitch character astride a floating island in the depths of Hell. Both weird and creepy.
Penguincon 2012
Elsa and I attended Penguincon 2012, that glorious celebration of Midwestern weird ingenuity. The name Penguincon might suggest it’s only for Linux nerds and though there is a strong track of programming for the silicon-inclined, Penguincon extends the notion of “open-source” deep into culture at large. Fair warning, culture at large. Penguincon overflowed with folks who never listened when someone told them “Don’t try that. It’s simply impossible.” Granted, there was hardly a speck of “horror” in the whole place, Elsa and the Good Doktor here both felt at home in this gathering of eccentric experimentation. These mad scientists know how to have a good time. There were too many wonders in the wunderkammer to list but three come to mind:
• John Scalzi was the writing guest of honor and his reading with Saladin Ahmed did not disappoint. I know Scalzi’s work mostly through his blog, Whatever which I read daily even though science fiction ain’t normally my thang. Scalzi was witty and warm, telling insider stories about the stories as he read from his latest book Redshirts, supplemented by the first three *sentences* of his unexpectedly hit story, “Shadow War of the Night Dragons.” Please note the date of its original publication. Saladin Ahmed was a gem not to be overlooked. His debut novel Throne of the Cresent Moon is a tale of ghul-hunting and royal power struggles in a fantastic medieval middle eastern setting. I’m reading it now and was glad to get my copy signed. Ahmed knows the tropes of fantasy fiction well enough to present a deeply fresh world populated by the kinds of characters that don’t often appear in genre literature. He’s a writer who knows who he is and tells stories that spring from a place deeper than just his imagination. Plus he’s a Midwestern boy. As at any con, Scalzi and Ahmed appeared on panels with other not-to-be overlooked authors like Jim C. Hines and Ferret Steinmetz.
• Eating is good. Sure there was the ConSuite and the Hack of Honor appearance of OpenSoda but the comestibles didn’t stop there. I sampled a chocolate laced with coconut rum and Elsa learned the mysteries of making melon caviar. The sad truth is that some experiments fail and the most glorious failure was something I tasted: cheese corn flavored ice cream. It was a near miss in my estimation however, a bit too salty. More conventionally successful flavors I tried were chai tea, chocolate, Dr. Pepper. Perhaps I should mention that the ice cream was made with food grade liquid nitrogen that spewed a cascade of roiling clouds as it darned near instantaneously froze the concoction.
• We brought home a few trinkets and baubles from the dealer room as well: a book by Cat Valente, a crystal ball for the Red Witch, a portrait of that other Doctor laser-engraved into a wood plaque by the folks AllHandsActive, a local MakerSpace… Elsa bought an exquisite striped corset from Ties that Bynde, clearly the best purchase. The charming and indulgent proprietress let her try on several styles.
It was our first time at PenguinCon and neither Elsa nor I knew what to expect. What did we encounter? Wonders beyond belief.
This Just In: The Bones in Satan’s Grotto are REAL
I suppose we file this one under art imitating life too closely. Or perhaps not bothering to “imitate” at all, just “cut and paste.” A tourist dungeon in London, UK discovered recently that some of the bones displayed proudly in their “Satan’s Grotto” — I gather it’s an annual, Mid-December feature, y’know, for the holidays — were actual human remains. I believe I’ve seen that situation in at least three separate TV shows. The most interesting part of the article to me is that the dungeon could have continued to display the remains if they paid an annual £ 2,000 “license fee” to the “Tissue Authority.” Now THAT’S a work-related sit-com I’d like to see on TV. Part tax-collectors / part CSI, they’re The Bone Guard.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-16037506
Jessica Harrison’s Artfully Disfigured Porcelain
Jessica Harrison, a UK artist, made these wonderfully reconfigured / disfigured porcelain figurines in a series called “Broken.” What I love particularly about the series is how she takes a gesture or pose of the original piece and adds that little extra horrifying bit that perfectly follows the form, yet completes it in a quite surprising and disturbing manner. They’re more than a cheap chuckle, IMHO. Harrison’s work suggests a quiet violence already implicit in the placid pastel colored kitsch.
And limited edition photographic prints of this “Broken” series are available for purchase:
Monster Heads for Charity
No it’s not some twisted scalp-hunt through the zombie infested streets. It’s something much more civilized. It’s Alive, a fund raiser for St Jude hospital in Orlando Florida got 80 artists to do their thing on a life-sized bust of Frankenstein’s monster. Some are clever. Some a little dumb but some are purely inspired like the Frankenberry I post above.
I am sorely tempted.
http://www.theitsaliveproject.org/Welcome.html
Flint Horror Convention
My traveling companion “Igor” and I stopped in at the first annual Flint Horror Convention yesterday and had ourselves a blast. Since it was the first year for this convention, we knew the edges might not be brightly polished but we didn’t know if they’d be jagged and bloody, if you dig what I’m saying. I’m very pleased to say that for a small con, the inaugural Flint Horror Con was both well run and pretty darned satisfying.
The dealers’ room had a nice mix of vendors from across the state, each one hopped up and enthusiastic about their work. Sure they were selling something but most of them need to have a day job to fund their participation in the horror subculture. Like at any con, it was more about passion than cash. Readers of the DailyNightmare will have detected my predilection for artsy snob horror – not to diss the schlock-meisters and camp-crafters but it’s just not my thing. Let me note a couple artists who really delivered what I was looking for:
• Ash of 13 Foot Fall.com snaps graveyard photos that transcend the well-worn “ooky-spooky” feel so prevalent in other tombstone photography I’ve seen. As to be expected, he’s mastered and moved beyond capturing the sombre colors and rich textures of memorials left to the elements. His most effective work, for me, focused on toys left at the graves of children. At their best, they achieve that yearning tug of loss and nostalgia, with a nice dollop of revulsion and creep-out.
• Steve Jenks of Lost Highway crafts movie posters for classics of the genre – I snapped up his “Hellraiser” and “Halloween.” What delighted me about Steve’s work was how it used immediately recognizable subject matter but did more than simply reproduced a familiar screen capture. His posters express a synoptic vision of the movie as a whole encapsulated within the vernacular of the drive-in movie poster. That’s art school-speak for “he makes posters for well-loved horror movies that are both familiar and fresh.” Digital illustration gives him a clean precision and his clever use of color mimics the printing techniques of yore.
• Steven J Bejma of Classic Horrors is a generous, warm-hearted guy who memorializes horror greats in the classic media of oil paint and stretched canvas. My favorite piece of his was a portrait of Tor Johnson. In life, the face of Tor Johnson scares me about as much as a pile of cold mashed potatoes but Steven’s portrait transformed it with a greenish cast and subtle warts to a visage that is truly scary. Well done.
I also picked up discs from several Michigan film makers that I hope to view and review in the coming months and a few other trinkets here and there. I was really encouraged to see so many bright eyed horror creators from my home state venturing out from their crypts to support a new convention.
My eyes were still dripping full of movies from the Three Corpse Circus the night before, so I didn’t spend much time in the movie room, sad to say. “Igor” described a situation where the sound cut out on one of the films and an audience member familiar with the production rose to the occasion to lip-sync the missing dialogue. Sounds like a hoot.
I knew I just had to catch the panel discussion with Lucifer Fulci, a musician whose work I knew literally *nothing* about. Call me superficial, but I thought to myself, someone who looks that cool MUST be serious. Lucifer’s remarks didn’t disappoint if for no other reason than they go against the stereotypes some have about “those darned rock-n-roll types.” He’s vocally and un-apologetically anti-substance use. He holds down a respectable day-job in social work. He’s family man – heck Lucifer’s proud parents were sitting in the front row…. which is a sentence I never thought I would have the occasion to write. I appreciated his insistence on the theatricality of horror, the art and artifice, if you will. Horror is not about cruelty as it is about persona and presentation. A foundational influence on Lucifer’s work was, you guessed it, KISS.
Igor and I had a séance to get to so we had to bug out early. I would have liked to hear the panel about making movies in Michigan. Alas. The Masonic Temple was a cool, lightly creepy location for the convention and personally, I *loved* the opportunity to lunch again at the original Halo Burger. Next year, the Flint Horror Convention promises to be even better and I already plan to be there. And to stay the whole day.
Other Haunts: Comparative Skeletons
I am a serious fan of skeletal systems, those bits of organic sculpture / architecture that each of us carry around inside us — pardon, of course to the readers of this blog that are cephalopod or who have exoskeletons. You critters are too wonderful for mention. Don’t go changing.
So imagine my delight when I found eskeletons.org, an electronic archive of primate skeletons. (http://eskeletons.org/index.html)
Certainly IMHO the skulls are the coolest, like this multi-view scan of a human skull but the other bones are fascinating as well.
The only thing you can’t do with these bones is make broth.
http://www.eskeletons.org/
Other Haunts – Theatre Bizarre
Theatre Bizarre had the best spread at the Maker Faire Detroit this weekend. These humble photos don’t do proper justice. Six foot tall hand-painted banners. Carefully decrepitized ticket booths. The works. They were so awesome my first assumption was that they weren’t local. But I was wrong. Theatre Bizarre host (ed) a miscreant Halloween party down by the old Michigan State Fairgrounds. The parties went on for nearly a decade until they were shut down last year.
A documentary is in process about Theatre Bizarre. It’s actively soliciting funds. Toss ‘em a few if you get a chance.
Other Haunts: Hexing Hitler
In 1941, a group of folks assembled to put a “hex” on Hitler. Life Magazine – the internet of those times – was on hand to record the event with some snappy photojournalism. Godwin’s Law be damned: this is a hoot, that is, using the “forces of Darkness” to combat “Evil incarnate.”
http://www.life.com/image/ugc1017252/in-gallery/36172/putting-a-hex-on-hitler-1941
Your position on the utility of hexes or the authenticity of these particular would-be pagans is not the point. We humans need to feel as if we are doing something that is meaningful, that our actions have an effect especially during times of distress. During WWII, we had collections for scrap metal. We grew “victory gardens.” Contemporary reflection somewhat pessimistically notes that these activities didn’t really help the war effort as much as they bolstered the moral of those on the home front. So why not “hexes?”
There was great recent controversy when someone planned to burn multiple copies of the Qu’ran. It prompted folks across the Muslim world to burn effigies of just about everyone they didn’t like… even though, as I read it, it’s a cultural proscription, if not cardinal no-no to make graven images of humans. This emphasis on non-representative art is a contributing factor to the splendor of Islamic geometric mosaics, I’m told. Would there have been such an outrage if the American protest only burned – or put a hex – on representations of Bin Laden?
If you’re getting hung up on the whole black magic thing, perhaps because of christian baggage, then call it an “imprecatory prayer.” Lord knows there are enough bible-belters using such language as veiled threats against the president. You’ve maybe seen the bumper stickers that say “Pray for Obama – Psalm 108 8 & 9″ Look those lines up, will ya? They’re not the cuddly Loving Shepherd. They say “May the days of his reign be few; let his children be fatherless and his wife a widow.” Ah, explain to me how that’s NOT outright sedition?
Movies: Three Corpse Circus (review)
Three Corpse Circus took over the historic Michigan Theatre in Ann Arbor, MI last night, Devil’s Night and presented four hours of short horror movies. Yup, four whole hours of films, contests and costumed tomfoolery. If you weren’t there, you done goofed up bad. I spoke briefly with one of the organizers Jonathan Barkan who says they hope the Circus will grow to be more than just a film festival, that Three Corpse Circus might become a rallying point for the horror community in Michigan. Last night was a excellent start.
The films were better than I’d feared, a notch above the mixed bag you’d expect from a college town. A couple were real gems. Others were arty and experimental. Some cute and amusing. And to be frank, some were unspeakable, trite, poorly shot, not acted at all… dumb. Bad even for Youtube. But what I saw last night were movies I never would have seen elsewhere. Most of the pieces had some aspect that was pretty interesting. Their failures were mostly in consistency. Technically, I suppose many of the movies were “mediocre” but I mean a kind of expectant and exciting mediocrity. They left me with a sense of anticipation, that I’m really interested in seeing the NEXT movie by these film makers.
A great example of this category is “The Lair.” (http://www.thelair-movie.com/) The acting was more than good enough, much better than many commercial horror movies. There was evidence of actual script composition and, egad, character development, again a relative rarity in short horror. Competent editing built actual suspense and didn’t rely on cheap jump scares, well, not excessively. OK so the setting was the tried and true deserted campground and, granted, the premise wasn’t the most original. But the piece was generally effective. If I had to be a dick – and critics are supposed to be dicks, right? – the footage shot at night was too grainy. But where else would I have had the opportunity to see this film except at a film festival like Three Corpse Circus?
A gem of the evening was “Connected,” one two offerings from Denmark. (http://www.ov43.com/) Clocking in at barely 8 minutes, “Connected” gets in, does the job and gets out and it does so ENTIRELY WORDLESSLY. Great futuristic costumes, a convincing post apocalyptic backdrop and a clear situation, conflict and bleak resolution. It was probably dark science fiction more than straight out horror but, damn, it was a joy to watch. And again, I never would have even heard of it if I hadn’t attended the Three Corpse Circus.
The true highlight of the evening for me was the other Danish film Opstandelsen (“Ressurection”) which was as good a zombie movie as I’ve ever seen – and this is coming from someone who doesn’t find zombies particularly compelling. The movie is shot in and around an old austere church and incidentally, they shot the HELL out of this location. There are scenes in the sanctuary, the basement, UNDERNEATH the basement, the bell tower… I’ve whined in the past how easy access to fantastic ancient locations can make even crappy European movies into something watch-worthy, but the makers of Opstandelsen squeeze every bit of ambience from this place. It’s not just a cheap and easy backdrop. The prosthetics were first rate and relatively understated. The blood and gore was believable and I think the tone of its color grew progressively darker until the blood was nearly black by the end. The make up especially on the female survivor was exceptional. By the end of the movie, she was basically wearing corpse paint – her skin so pale as to be nearly white with drippy spatters of dark blood around her eyes. Lovely! The script showed off nice characterization with juicy familial strife. All three of the primary survivors had character arcs that led to satisfying conclusions. Damn, it’s hard to find something to complain about but, perhaps the range of the acting was a bit constrained – one character always stuck on high, another on low with the coke-snorting protagonist being a nice blend. I’d have to see it again before I said it was perfect but since it’s a 50 minute movie, a length too short to distribute commercially and too long for the internet, there is likely NO chance I would have been able to see it at all except at a film festival like Three Corpse Circus.
You’ve picked up on my take-home message by now. If you’re into horror and you’re in Michigan, get to the next Three Corpse Circus. It was well worth while this year and every indication is that it’s just going to continue to get better.
Anatomy of a Marshmallow Man
What’s REALLY inside a marshmallow man. And I don’t mean the ingredients list. Bid now on eBay.
