Black Gate

My second movie of Fantasia 2019 was in the 750-plus seat Hall Theatre. Little Monsters stars Lupita Nyong’o as a kindergarten teacher who takes her class on a field trip — only to get caught up in a zombie invasion. Written and directed by Abe Forsythe, it’s an occasionally tasteless but surprisingly effective horror-comedy.

The movie begins with an argument between a man and a woman, shown through a montage as one ongoing shouting match over months or years. Quick gags establish that she’s a high-achiever and he isn’t, and that she wants kids while he doesn’t. It’s funny and well-paced, a good way to start the movie and establish the lead character. After the relationship ends in a break-up we follow the man, Dave (Alexander England), as he moves in with his sister and does a terrible job of being a responsible mentor to his nephew Felix (Diesel La Torraca). When Dave falls for Felix’s kindergarten teacher, Miss Caroline (Nyong’o), though, he volunteers to help her lead the class in a field trip to a nearby petting zoo and minigolf course. Which happens to be next door to an American military base. Where the experimental subjects have just gotten loose. Those subjects are of course zombies, and when they swarm the nearby farm Miss Caroline and Dave have to do their best to save the kids — aided, abetted, and more often opposed by children’s entertainer Teddy McGiggles (Josh Gad, the voice of Olaf in Frozen).

It’s a solid comedy film. The jokes are inventive, most of them land, and they’re constructed well: there are set-ups you don’t notice and pay-offs you don’t see coming. This helps tie in the pre-zombie parts of the film to the main course. Themes running through the movie come to the fore under the pressure of action, too. Character is revealed in different ways at different points. Since the humour arises out of recognisable if exaggerated people doing roughly credible things, it’s surprisingly engaging. Add as well solid comic timing, and pacing that always moves quickly and lightly.

There are some jokes that are predictable. Young children are inevitably made to say or see something hideously inappropriate (though not in terms of their exposure to gore, which the movie does not use extensively). Dave’s a loser at the start of the film, so various jokes follow from that. Personally I could have done without seeing Asian tourists with cameras, though one might argue this was not blatantly playing to stereotyped tropes.

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Not long ago I acquired copies of two well-known anthologies: Dangerous Visions and Again, Dangerous Visions.

(This post is not about the books. This post is the beginning of my coverage of the Fantasia International Film Festival, Montreal’s long-running three-week genre film festival, and is specifically about the first movie I saw there in 2019, an independent horror film called The Deeper You Dig. But it is useful to start with the anthologies, or the idea of the anthologies.)

I’ve yet to read deeply into the books. But I’d always wanted copies, because of the promise of the titles: the promise of art, of visions, that pose a danger to the audience. Stories that will do something to you if you read them. That will change you, in ways you might not understand, through a process you might beforehand perceive as a psychic danger. What I have come to realise is that the art that has meant the most to me has been the art that has changed me the most without my expecting it or being able to stop it. There’s a thrill in art that can rework you and refashion you into something else. It may be a danger, but without danger there is no real adventure.

It is perhaps accurate to say that one is changed by every kind of art, even by every experience one has. But it’s also true that there’s a specific kind of experience that art can give. The nature of this experience is difficult to articulate, but a change in the self that experiences the art is a part of it. In this way the influence of art is difficult to predict and difficult to trace in recorded history, yet is very real.

And this I think is why after several years, after learning much about film as artform and as industry, I’m still drawn to Fantasia. Not every film it shows is an aesthetic success. But many of them are. And many of them are the kind of works that can change you, in that most difficult to define fashion. You don’t know which ones until you watch them, mostly. But the act of finding out, of dedicating time to the perception and experience of art, is a reward in itself.

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