Black Gate

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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