Black Gate

As the date around which the entire Goth Chick News calendar revolves, draws ever nearer, the horror movie marathon in our subterranean office continues. Of course, there is much debate on the topic of “scariest.” Is it classic vs. newer releases, or blood-baths vs. atmospheric? Is it high tech and CGI or micro-budget? I decided to do a little research among the dozens of “best of” lists to settle some of the debates, when amazingly enough I found a scientific study on just this topic.

UK-based broadband comparison site, Broadband Choices has tackled the question for the second year with their Science of Scare research project. The goal? To scientifically discover the scariest horror movie of all time. Broadband Choices invites 250 study subjects to watch 40 horror movies considered the “scariest” based on Reddit recommendations and critics’ “best of” lists. This years’ offering included the top 30 films as ranked in the 2020 Science of Scare experiment, plus and additional 10 new entries.

Study subjects are fitted with heart rate monitors and seated in screening rooms to watch all the movies over the course of several weeks. Researchers (and medical personnel) observe the subjects and measure the average impact the shortlisted movies had on the heart rate (measured in BPM) of the subjects, compared to the average resting BPM of 64.

So, what movie collectively raised the heart rates of this year’s study subjects most?

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“Bed” is a 10-minute short film from Emily Bennett about a woman facing her fears. Our protagonist, Madeline, is alone in her apartment and we learn that she’s been hiding out there for some time. There’s something in her bedroom that scares her, something to do with her bed. We see that fear coming to a final confrontation, and a hint of what comes after. It’s an effective piece that tells a story tautly and well, and makes a single location visually interesting as it extracts different emotional tones out of the one place.

With it was bundled When I Consume You, a feature film written and directed by Perry Blackshear. In 2015 I reviewed and quite liked his first movie, They Look Like People, a humanistic and atmospheric story with elements of horror, about the emotional bonds between two people and how they’re tested. Which description fits When I Consume You as well.

It’s the story of Wilson Shaw and his sister Daphne, two people from a poor background struggling to get by in New York City; Wilson (Evan Dumouchel, who was also in They Look Like People) is a gentle man who’s had little luck in the job market, while Daphne (Libby Ewing) is an aggressive woman with a history of addiction who’s fiercely protective of her older brother. But someone or something from her dark past is after her. When it catches up with her it at least appears to be supernatural. Can Wilson toughen up enough to defeat a force Daphne cannot? Or is there a trick hidden in that question?

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Each year Fantasia dedicates one of its short film showcases to animation. The 2021 edition was playing on-demand throughout the festival, and when a hole in my schedule opened up, I was happy to plug it with this year’s Circo Animato, a selection of 13 films from 7 countries.

“Ouroboros,” from France, led off. Written and directed by Chloé Forestier, it’s a lushly-coloured three-minute piece. Like many of these shorts, it’s 2D animation with no dialogue. On a pleasant afternoon, a depressing purple goop or shade begins to swallow up a town. But, as we see, sometimes when faced with a despairing situation simple action can be a start. It’s a nice parable about breaking out of old habits; you can watch it here.

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Food, culture, and magic are deeply interlinked: geography and climate and trade routes determine ingredients, traditions transmit recipes, recipes are linked to folk beliefs, and ultimately the things we consume shape us. We are what we eat, and what we believe about the things we eat says something about us. Eating is a necessary act, and so there’s magic in it, varying with culture and ingredients.

Thus Food Of My People, a new anthology from Exile Editions co-edited by Candas Jane Dorsey and Ursula Pflug. Twenty-one stories, plus a twenty-second in Dorsey’s introduction, tell tales of food and the fantastic. There are tales reflecting a range of cultural traditions, though with a geographical focus on Canada (both editors and the publisher are Canadian). And each story is followed with a recipe, sometimes a practical usable one, sometimes a fantastical extension of the fiction.

Most of the stories are set in this world and this time, though a few take place in the future and a couple in fantastic secondary worlds. In Pflug’s Afterword, she points out that several of the stories can be described as New Weird, and if there is an overall genre tone to the book that’s probably it. The physicality of the subgenre aside, there’s something deeply weird about the process of eating, something about transformation at a deep level: ingredients into food, food into energy and shit, the whole process implausibly warding off hunger pains and sustaining life.

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“Inside” is a 5-minute animated short co-directed by Pohan Lee and Chun-Chien Lien, and written by Lien. It’s a simple piece, but quite beautiful. A voice-over talks about the differences within people, while the animation shows us paperlike images illustrating their various internal natures: within human silhouettes a series of pictures unfold. The idea’s elementary, but the film works quite well because the visual imagination is boundless and ultimately even cosmic, showing us the infinite bounded in a human shell.

Bundled with the short at Fantasia was Hello! Tapir. A Taiwanese film from Kethsvin Chee, it was written by Chee, Chris Leong, and Yoon Yee Teh. Ah Keat (Run-yin Bai) is an eight-year-old boy whose father (Lee-zen Lee) is a fisherman. One day a typhoon blows up, and his father goes missing. But Ah Keat refuses to accept his father’s dead. Remembering a story his father once told him about a creature called a Tapir, who eats dreams, he sets out to find the mysterious entity with the help of his friends, believing that the Tapir’s magic can return his father to him.

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Though I can’t say I love everything Jason Blum produces, I would say that if he ever calls the Black Gate office looking for me, someone bloody well transfer him to my cell phone pronto.

Though Blum has been the driving force behind nearly 200 films dating back to 1995, it was when he created his own micro-budget company, Blumhouse Productions, in 2000 that he finally had the creative freedom to scare the living crap out of us. Blum’s low budget model launched his horror career with a serious winner. Paranormal Activity cost $15K to make thanks to Blum borrowing a location and camera equipment, and paying two of his friends $500 each to star.

Flash forward a few years to when Paramount acquired the U.S. rights for $350K. PA went on to pull in $193 million worldwide, making this the second most profitable film ever made based on a return of investment, behind only The Blair Witch Project. Word is that during PA’s first test screenings, people started leaving the theater. Blum thought he had made a flop, only to discover that people left the auditorium because they couldn’t handle the intensity of the scares.

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I closed out the fifth day of Fantasia 2021 with another short-and-feature bundle. “Vulnerability” (“Seijakusei”) is a 26-minute piece from Japan, written and directed by Eiji Tanigawa. It was made as an episode of an anthology TV show for FOD, the streaming arm of the Fuji Television Network; “Nogizaka Cinemas -STORY of 46-” is a show featuring idol group Nogizaka46, with each episode starring a different member. “Vulnerability” is a mixture of detective story and near-future science-fiction that plays out a little like Blade Runner if the replicants weren’t really that advanced.

In the year 2027, the Messiah lifestyle support androids (all played by Shiori Kubo) are perfect duplicates of human beings, with the rudimentary personality of a digital assistant. Something odd’s going on with their owners, though, who are displaying strange outbursts of violence. Two cops try to find what’s happening, but will they prove vulnerable to the weird effect? It’s a well-told story, with very strong visuals, an intriguing theme about living with digital perfection, and a good structure that ends in a surprising place. It won Fantasia’s International Short Film competition, and you can see it for yourself here.

The feature that accompanied the short was Seobok (서복), a science-fiction story from Korea with action and espionage elements. It follows Min Ki-hun (Gong Yoo, Train to Busan), a Korean secret service agent now retired and afflicted with a fatal brain tumour. His former superior, who he neither trusts nor likes, calls on him for one last mission — which might save his life.

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I opened the fourth day of Fantasia 2021 with a bundle of two animated films. The shorter was “Bye-Bye Elida,” a 35-minute piece written and directed by Titouan Bordeau. It takes place in a strange desert, where various people and creatures wander about and connect up. There is no dialogue, and I felt the piece might have benefitted from more explanation — or from more detailed visual storytelling, one of the two. The general idea here is clear; the different characters the film presents, cutting between them at odd points, are all players in an overall ecology. It’s a little like Larry Marder’s Tales of the Beanworld (a most peculiar comic book experience), a similarity enhanced by the whimsical designs, the 2D linework, and the restrained colours. But I didn’t find myself engaged in the same way; the individual sections had too rudimentary a narrative, and at least at one viewing the conclusion didn’t tie enough together for me. It’s an interesting experiment, but not to my mind entirely successful.

The feature film was Little Vampire, directed by Joann Sfar from his own graphic novels, with the adaptation co-scripted by Sandrina Jardel. It opens with Pandora (Camille Cottin), the young and beautiful mother of a ten-year-old boy (Louise Lacoste) being chased with her child by an aristocrat obsessed with her; she calls on the spirits of the dead; they answer; the woman and boy become a vampire, and flee with the skeletal captain of a flying ship — the Flying Dutchman (Jean-Paul Rouve). Three hundred years later, they’ve built a sanctuary from the twisted monster the cruel nobleman has become, a thing called the Gibbus (Alex Lutz). Pandora and the Flying Dutchman have ensured that their boy, known only as Little Vampire, doesn’t remember any of the long pursuit. Instead they all live (well, as it were) in a sprawling crumbling mansion on a hill, where Little Vampire and his monster friends watch horror movies every night.

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