Black Gate

This week we’re looking at the spate of Arabian Nights fantasies that came out of Hollywood during World War II, when cinema audiences were looking for colorful distractions from the grim news of the war. And boy howdy, were these films ever colorful distractions, bizarre and often wacky in ways that seem incredible by current standards.

The example was set, not by Hollywood, but by the 1940 British production of The Thief of Bagdad, a serious fantasy film that established the whole genre. We’ll start with that and then introduce Hollywood’s increasingly strange variations on the theme. Hang on to your turbans!

The Thief of Bagdad

Rating: ****
Origin: UK, 1940
Directors: Ludwig Berger, Michael Powell, Tim Whelan
Source: Criterion Collection DVD

Everybody loves this movie. It’s got heart, magic, music, adventure, romance, and ambitious special effects that alternate between stupendous and hilarious. Hang it, even I love this movie. And yet, to be perfectly frank, it’s a bit of a mess.

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Day four of Fantasia was another quiet one for me, with a single movie on my docket. First, though, came a panel discussion with some of the editors of Rue Morgue magazine. Rue Morgue’s been covering horror and related fields since the late 1990s, and it continues to exist as a print publication even while maintaining a strong web presence. A wide-ranging discussion anchored by Executive Editor Andrea Subissati dealt with, among other things, the challenges of keeping the magazine going, how to start writing for Rue Morgue and in general, and the practicalities of publishing. You can find it here.

Not too long after that I watched The Curse of Audrey Earnshaw, written and directed by Thomas Robert Lee. It’s a solid occult horror film with an original setting, but I found it frustrating as well. While it’s a good movie, the sort of thing that’d make for fine Halloween viewing, I thought a few things done a little differently could have made it truly outstanding.

It opens with an extensive text crawl explaining backstory. In 1873 a group of immigrants from Ireland settled in North America, and maintained the traditions of their era as the world changed around them. In 1956 a curse settled on their lands, at the same time as a woman named Agatha Earnshaw (Catherine Walker) secretly bore a child she named Audrey. It’s now 1973; Agatha’s kept now-17-year-old Audrey (Jessica Reynolds) hidden from the community all her life, but Audrey’s begun to develop strange powers, while the rest of the people continue to struggle with their barren fields.

The movie opens with Audrey, hidden in a box, watching her mother be accosted by townspeople. A young couple’s just seen their boy die, and the father, Colm (Jared Abrahamson), takes out his grief on Audrey, a figure of suspicion because her farm is the only one in the area consistently producing healthy crops. He threatens her, pushes her, and threatens to take her goods before his father, Seamus, the priest of the village, steps in and calms things down. Audrey decides to seek revenge on Colm, and on everyone else who mistreats her and her mother, a quest that threatens the destruction not only of Colm and his wife Bridget (Hannah Emily Anderson) but of the rest of their community as well.

The first thing to be said about this film is that it looks spectacular. Wide vistas show nature in late autumn, dark and barren. The lighting’s spectacular, using what looks like rich natural light, and the muted muted colour palette builds a strong atmosphere. Costumes and props immerse the viewer in the not-quite-Victorian world of the community.

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I had a light schedule on the third day of Fantasia, as I tried to finish off some other business. But at 4 PM I sat down to watch the presentation of the festival’s Lifetime Achievement Award to John Carpenter. The ceremony was necessarily less than what it usually was, but the question-and-answer session that followed was rich and generous. I was particularly intrigued when Carpenter was asked about projects he regretted being unable to make, and he said that he’d tried to get Alfred Bester’s The Stars My Destination to screen but had been unable to get the script structure to work — and now suspects the book’s unfilmable. You can find the entire discussion here.

That evening I sat down to watch a Korean movie called Jesters: The Game Changers. Bundled with it was a short, “Yonorang” (작은 뼈), a visually stylish film directed by Kim Sangdong and written by Lee Sohyun. It’s a mostly dialogue-free story told in 8 minutes, incorporating monsters and swordfights and betrayal. The chronology’s fractured, too, and I found the relationship of the various scenes difficult to parse at one viewing. This is too bad, as it looks lovely (a little like Samurai Jack, but more stylised), and moment-by-moment the drama was palpable. I just couldn’t fit the pieces of the story together.

Jesters: The Game Changers (Gwang-dae-deul: Poong-moon-jo-jak-dan, 광대들: 풍문조작단) was directed by Kim Joo-ho from a script by Kim Jin-wook and Shin Jin-wook. It’s a somewhat-comic historical adventure story with fantasy touches set in the fifteenth century. King Sejo has usurped the country from his nephew and as the movie opens, all across the land jesters — wandering actors — are staging a popular play about the usurpation and the execution of six loyal ministers. Sejo orders the execution of the treasonous jesters, while his chief minister, Han Myung-Hee (Son Hyun-Joo) recruits a team of jesters of his own to present alternative facts and make the people believe that Sejo is the true anointed ruler.

The film follows the troupe as they alternatively propagandise for Sejo and then are alienated from the tyrannical monarch. The leader of the troupe, and the central character of the film, is Deok-ho (Cho Jin-woong, from, among other places, Kundo and Assassination), whose group includes an exiled painter (Yoon Park), a failed fortuneteller (Kim Seul-Gi), an acrobat (Kim Min-Suk), and a puppeteer (Ko Chang-Seok). They concoct incredible stage effects to simulate miracles, sometimes on vast scales, and the set-pieces the film gives us are structured around the inventive if improbable use of period technology to create these illusions. It’s not exactly clockpunk, in that the technology’s a step earlier than clockwork, but they do use things like magic lanterns — in devices that look surprisingly like modern movie projectors.

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One of the new wrinkles to Fantasia this year is the existence of a Discord where filmmakers and critics and audiences can chat with each other about the movies playing the festival. It’s already proved quite useful to me, as seeing other people discussing films has helped draw my attention to a few titles I’d originally dismissed as uninteresting or out of step with this web site’s focus. A case in point was the movie I watched late on Fantasia’s second day, writer-director Ben Hozie’s PVT Chat.

It’s got no element of the fantastic. But it’s a kind of crime story, and indeed from a certain angle is one of the damnedest film noirs I’ve ever seen. While also being sexually explicit (and what I am told the kids these days call kink friendly) to a surprising degree.

The film opens with Jack (Peter Vack), a young New Yorker, alone in his apartment masturbating. Jack spends a lot of time watching camgirls, and we hear him describing to them what he wants (“verbal abuse”) and setting up scenarios to play through. He finds a new girl, Scarlet (Juia Fox), who swiftly becomes his favourite. We find out that Jack doesn’t have much else going on in his life. He supports himself, barely, by playing online blackjack. He seems to be spiralling downward, so desperate for actual human contact he makes friends with the guy his landlord hired to paint his apartment. Then he thinks he sees Scarlet in a neighbourhood store. But Scarlet tells him she lives in San Francisco, and swears she’s never been to New York.

This first act of the movie is well-made and thoughtful, but a little slow, and I found it a bit difficult to care about at first viewing. It’s important for establishing Jack and his situation, though, and it does a solid job of making us question his grasp on reality — was he hallucinating? Or, even though he’s had moments of actual connection with Scarlet, is she lying to a john?

We find out as the movie suddenly sharply expands its focus. We follow other characters, and the story takes some new twists, opening up in unexpected ways. Thematically the film’s focus becomes clearer and more intricate. We get different angles on how the characters are telling stories of their lives, scripting and directing what they want and what they see. Jack’s already lied to Scarlet about his job, concocting an imaginary telepathic technology out of whole cloth. Without wanting to give too much away, we later find out how much she has lied and how much she has told the truth to him; we find out more about her art — she’s already shown him paintings she made — and about her job. As in 2018’s Cam, the parallel between film narrative and webcam porn is examined, both visual media involving scripted fictions.

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As part of the unusual nature of this year’s Fantasia, the festival organisers set up many more non-film special events than usual. Each day boasts a presentation, panel discussion, or other streamed activity, all of them to be archived on the festival’s YouTube page (in fact the organisers have just announced they’ll host a conversation between Jay Baruchel and Finn Wolfhard on August 29). Friday, August 21, began with a presentation by critic and author Carolyn Mauricette of “Afrofuturism: Visions Of the Future From ‘The Other’ Side.” It was a fascinating hour-long talk about Black creators and their work. Rather than focus on themes or analyse individual accomplishments, Mauricette gave a brief introduction about mass media views of Blackness and then positioned Afrofuturism as an alternative reality, listing artists in various fields, and indeed mentioning alternatives to Afrofuturism such as filmmaker Wanuri Kahiu’s Afrobubblegum. You can find the entire presentation here.

After that, I planned to watch the Argentinian horror film The Undertaker’s Home. Bundled with the feature came a short, “Abracitos,” directed by Tony Morales and written by Morales with Fer Zaragoza. The 11-minute Spanish short is a deeply atmospheric tale of two girls (Beatriz and Carmen Salas) alone at night, fearing a monster beyond the walls of the younger girl’s make-believe castle. It’s extremely well shot, evoking nonspecific fears of childhood, effectively setting up a monster without giving us details. It’s a strong minimalist piece that works on the imagination, and builds nicely to a crescendo of terror.

The Undertaker’s Home (La Funeraria) was written and directed by Mauro Iván Ojeda. It begins, appropriately, with a house, through which the camera glides in the middle of the night. That’s an effective way of showing us a bit about the people who live there: Bernardo (Luis Machín), the aging undertaker; Estela (Celeste Gerez), his young wife; and Irina (Camila Vaccarini), Estela’s daughter by a previous marriage. We also start to get a sense of the uncanny tied to the place. And the next morning there’s a more concrete image of strange goings-on: outside the house, everything to one side of a red line drawn along the ground looks as though a storm had hit. On the house’s side of the line, everything’s normal.

We soon learn that the family is under a kind of siege by the spirits of the dead, which might include the spirit of Irina’s dead father — who Estela claims was physically abusive to her. Irina’s not happy about living under siege, and about the rules the family has to follow. Estela’s not happy either, but wants to stay with Bernardo. Who himself seems to be strangely attracted to one of the invisible spirits. Slowly, we come to understand the strange situation, and the stresses the family’s under. And then new complications emerge, and we are shown that not everything is as we thought, both in the world of the dead and the world of the living family.

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My first scheduled film at Fantasia 2020 was Special Actors (Supesharu Akutâzu, スペシャルアクターズ), written and directed by Shinichiro Ueda. I loved Ueda’s previous film, 2018’s One Cut of the Dead (Kamera wo tomeruna!, カメラを止めるな！), and this is his first solo feature since; he co-directed 2019’s Aesop’s Game (Isoppu no Omou Tsubo, イソップの思うツボ), and this year posted a special short film follow-up to One Cut on YouTube. Special Actors turned out to be very different from One Cut while still dealing with themes of storytelling and acting and family — and doing something as structurally surprising as One Cut in a completely different way.

Kazuto (Kazuto Osawa) is a failing actor with a medical condition that causes him to faint when nervous; a lucky encounter with his brother Hiroki (Hiroki Kono), who he hasn’t seen for years, leads him to join Hiroki’s acting company, Special Actors. Rather than perform onstage, the Special Actors play roles in real life: they can be hired as extra mourners at a funeral, or to sit in the audience at the premier of a comic movie and laugh wildly. They will also do more elaborate things, like stage a fight with a guy so he can look tough in front of a girl he wants to impress, or pretend to be the new lover of a woman trying to break up with her abusive boyfriend.

In other words, the Special Actors stage scenarios to help people live their lives. They’re a troupe of weirdos complete with acting coach and scriptwriter, and despite his self-doubts Kazuto fits right in. Then a young woman, Miyu (Yumi Ogawa), comes to the Actors with a tricky request: her sister has joined a cult, who are working on getting her to turn over the family inn. Can the Special Actors expose the cult’s lies and save the inn?

The answer to that question of course involves a series of wild schemes, and schemes inside schemes. Yet this movie avoids frantic zaniness in favour of a constant but relaxed pace. There’s some mugging, but nothing extreme. Jokes come quickly, and build to appropriately chaotic scenes; still, as a whole the film’s anything but manic. There’s a kind of humanity to it that counterbalances the contrivances of the plot and its various twists and contortions.

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