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TURBO KILLER

Feast your eyes on this video for Carpenter Brut's "Turbo Killer". Another certified synthwave banger from the Frenchman, accompanied by some slicker-than-slick fetishistic imagery, courtesy of CG wizard Seth Ickerman. This is four minutes of 100% pure, neon Miami, cocaine-on-steroids, faux grindhouse insanity (a decade on and the cigarette burns and scratches aesthetic is still going strong. Robert Rodriguez, what hath thou wrought?)

However, you might want to check your moral compass at the door. Beautiful women, literally driven as muscle cars? Now THAT'S objectification!

Hit full screen 1080p, crank up your speakers, and enjoy some French sci-fi cheese served with a side of blasting horror-synth.

SISTER HELL

Here's a tasty slice of blasphemy to start your Sunday off right. In Sister Hell Norwegian shorts director Fredrik S. Hana has crafted a loving homage to the darker works of Ken Russell. Fifteen minutes of stylish eye candy that feels like a seamless blend of Russell's The Devils and Crimes of Passion.

This was awarded Best Short Horror at last year's Fantastic Fest and it's not hard to see why. Gorgeously shot (the lighting and framing are something else), Sister Hell also features nifty practical fx, a cool score and an ultra sultry performance from Johanna Knudsen Rostad as the titular sinful nun (I also like Thomas Aske Berg as the biker, kind of reminds me of a young Michael Biehn).

Hana is currently writing his first feature.

SISTER HELL (short film, 15 min) from BLÆST on Vimeo.

ETHEREAL CHRYSALIS

Spend a few fucked-up minutes inside the head of Syl Disjonk. You'll be happy you did. IMDB tells me that this Québecois madman (and Voivod loving metalhead) contributed vfx to Éric Falardeau's existential gorefest Thanatomorphose*, but before today I'd never heard of him (so thanks Twitch).

Disjonk's fringe sci-fi/horror aesthetic would be a perfect fit for Astron-6, as his shorts have more than a passing resemblance to the work of fellow Canadian Steven Kostanski. However, please disregard my lazy comparison, because this guy is obviously on his own trip. 2011's award winning Ethereal Chrysalis is a brain melting hybrid of Lynch, Lovecraft, Terry Gilliam's Monty Python animation and the hellish fleshscapes of Australian surrealist James Gleeson. It also features a great score by Martin Gauthier (who scored 2007's underrated demonic subway shocker End of the Line) and practical fx work by none other than the infamous Rémy Couture.

Dim the lights, crank up the volume and enjoy! 

*Disjonk also served as editor on a couple of shorts: Broken Flesh Ecstasy and Imperatrix Cornicula. Based on those titles alone, I have to see them.

INTERZONE DISPATCHES: Report #3

"I had a very disturbing dream last night. In this dream I found myself making love to a strange man. Only I'm having trouble you see, because he's old... and dying... and he smells bad, and I find him repulsive. But then he tells me that everything is erotic, that everything is sexual. You know what I mean? He tells me that even old flesh is erotic flesh. That disease is the love of two alien kinds of creatures for each other. That even dying is an act of eroticism. That talking is sexual. That breathing is sexual. That even to physically exist is sexual. And I believe him, and we make love beautifully."

Oh. You're back. That's a shame. You have my sympathy... but let's face facts, you knew exactly what you were getting yourself into when you voluntarily exposed yourself to the Cronenberg Signal. You thought the tumor had gone away? That you were in remission? Poor, naive fool. I'm afraid that your neoplasm has metastasized again. No, not to other organs. It's too late to salvage any of that. Way too late. Your Flesh was corrupted long ago, decayed beyond repair. Beyond recognition. No, I'm afraid the disease is done with your Flesh, and the way that it's metastasizing now is more destructive than ever.

You see, it appears to have spread to your thoughts now.

The trick is not to think of it as dying. Just try to think of it as a kind of transformation. I'm sorry, what was that? Will it hurt? Oh, yes. Yes I'm afraid it will.

My first Dispatch in four years can mean only one thing. Some new celluloid Flesh from David Cronenberg. This short, entitled The Nest and featuring the auteur himself as a deranged surgeon, was created as a tie-in to his new novel Consumed, and it's classic body horror era Cronenberg. 

All the elements are present: corrupted science, sexual parasites, coldly detached eroticism, insects and disease. A cool little throwback to the director's horror roots as we await the release of his next feature, Maps to the Stars.

LEVIATHAN AGES

Just saw this at Twitch and had to share. A couple of trailers for an upcoming short called Leviathan Ages, directed by one Jon Yeo, featuring surrealist imagery that's both startling and trippy. I'm kind of taken aback, because the weird, floating geometric/machine things remind me of some vivid nightmares that I had some years ago. 

As someone who's always defending practical effects and bemoaning the overuse of CGI, I see stuff like this and realise that CG really is an amazing tool in the right hands (see also Neill Blomkamp). This isn't the most photo-realistic animation, but it is very cool!

AFTERMATH: Mortician, Heal Thyself

cadaver's eyes... dead inside

Discerning gorehounds should require no introduction to Nacho Cerda, or his half hour mini-masterpiece Aftermath. The infamous little film was once considered to be somewhat of a holy grail for connoisseurs of grue, a bona fide underground phenomenon to be sought out and experienced on bootleg VHS. That was until a few years ago, when risk-taking DVD company Unearthed Films bequeathed it to the masses on a feature packed disc that collects the film with its two sibling works - The Awakening and Genesis.

To paraphrase something I wrote last year, I think Aftermath dwells in the same rarefied cinematic netherworld as Hideshi Hino's two Guinea Pig entries - Flowers of Flesh and Blood and Mermaid in a Manhole (both also available on DVD from Unearthed). It's a shadowy limbo where art and extreme gore coexist, comfortably and without a hint of pretension, irony or "artistic slumming".

Of course I'm not saying that horror cinema and "highbrow" art are mutually exclusive. One needs only peruse the works of Ken Russell, David Lynch, Kei Fujiwara, Lars von Trier, Shinya Tsukamoto, David Cronenberg, Jörg Buttgereit and many others to see that, if anything, the opposite is true. My point is that Aftermath and Hino's Guinea Pig films belong to a very small subset of films that seem to draw their inspiration from the least accessible reaches of each sphere - extreme gore (eg non-narrative, faux-snuff) and performance art.

What might appear to be an unlikely marriage at first glance suddenly makes more sense when you consider the shock tactics employed by some of the more extreme performance artists of the 60's, 70's and 80's. Take for example the excesses of the Viennese Aktionismus collective - the ritualistic disembowelment of animals favoured by Hermann Nitsch or the simulated penile dismemberment of Rudolf Schwarzkogler. There are undeniable commonalities shared by the extremes of horror and art: unfettered imagination; a desire to push cultural boundaries and explore taboos; a distaste for the banal, the mainstream and the commercial.

all in a day's work...

Cerda's Aftermath certainly ticks all these boxes - it's highly imaginative, taboo smashing and about as non-commercial as you can get. Not to say that Cerda didn't have commercial ambitions for Aftermath, indeed he originally conceived of it as a show reel to sell his talents as a director(!). However, unlike many show reels, this film isn't a shallow, technical exercise but a deeply personal project in it's own right. Amongst the gruesome proceedings, one can clearly see evidence of Cerda's fascination with Catholic iconography. It seems to me that the mortician here is a priest, garbed in his sacred vestments, and going through the motions of his familiar ritual. The morgue is his chapel... the autopsy table his altar. But all is not well in this death church, for the sense of elitist power that comes with the responsibility of presiding over the dead has overwhelmed the priest, festering into corruption and perversion.

The mortician's eyes, above his surgical mask, reveal a great deal of the turmoil that rages within. Self loathing, desire, pain, cunning, addiction, shame, and an exhaustion that will never be cured by sleep. His carnal desires have consumed him to the point that he has become an automaton, and although those eyes reveal much, they are also the dead eyes of a reptile. As dead as the corpses upon which the mortician works... and preys. Indeed the highly realistic cadavers laid out on the morgue's tables appear to have more life than he.

Speaking of convincing realism, Cerda did extensive research for Aftermath, interviewing a forensic surgeon and even attending a triple autopsy. The film was shot in a real, functioning morgue in Barcelona, and the corpses seen therein are a combination of exceptional prosthetic work and one amazing performance by a live actor. The outcome of all this research and attention to detail is a very unsettling vérité experience indeed. The late Chas. Balun even claimed that Nacho had gone too far, when he famously labeled the film as pornographic.

Add to the above attributes some beautiful cinematography, graceful editing and powerful sound design, and you've got yourself a pretty special little slice of sickness. Buy the DVD directly from Unearthed Films HERE. Beware the Necrophiliac Mortician...

Insect Politics

Before deserting your grey, battery-hen cubicle for the promise of another hazy weekend, I'd like to show you something genuinely mesmerising and beautiful. It's a short film called Loom, and it's the latest work from a German creative firm known as Polynoid. From a cursory glance around their website, they seem to specialise in high-end CG animation for advertising, however this particular film is a purely creative effort, presumably to draw attention to their talents.

Directed by Jan Bitzer, Ilija Brunck and Csaba Letay, this five minute short took a staggering entire year to complete. To put that into perspective, many bloated FX blockbusters complete a full feature's worth of CG in well under that time, resulting in the subpar "spectacles" that so often sully the screens at the local multiplex. Conversely, the love and attention to detail in Loom is evident in every frame of it's scant running time.

Enjoy, and have a good weekend.

INTERZONE DISPATCHES: Report #1

"You'll forgive me if I don't stay around to watch.

I just can't cope with the freaky stuff"

Over half a year into this blog, and the EYE is yet to cast it's baleful gaze sufficiently upon my favourite director... Mr. David Cronenberg. To remedy that I'm embarking on a series of reports dedicated to the Canadian Master. These reports are comprised of data gleaned from various covert sources of intelligence within the Zone and Annexia.

A WARNING that reading these will result in the development of tumors in the human cerebrum. If you read too much, you will feel these words coalesce, and become Flesh... uncontrollable Flesh.

I'll be looking at some recent examples of Cronenbergian influence & references in art, design and popular culture. I'll also be uploading a few of Cronenberg's rare short films for download. No, not Transfer, From The Drain, Stereo or Crimes Of The Future (the latter two of which have been easily available for a while now on Blue Underground's excellent Fast Company DVD). Rather, some of his early genre TV work, made at the same time that he was crafting his seminal shockers, Shivers and Rabid. These will be pretty rare to most people.

So keep watching here on CIVIC TV (Channel 83, Cable 12).

First up let's take a look at Cronenberg's short film Camera, commissioned by the Toronto International Film Fest in 2000 to celebrate it's 25th anniversary. Made just after eXistenZ, this brilliant and beautifully crafted short shares that film's connection to Videodrome in it's exploration of the Media's ability to transform the psyche, and through that, the body. Again technology is given "life" (though here it's less overtly organic). We've seen TVs, videotapes, typewriters and game consoles take on a malevolent life of their own. Now the camera itself becomes the antagonist.

It's pretty obvious that Cronenberg had Videodrome on the brain (pun intended) again at this period of his career, when Camera's human protagonist relates a nightmare he had:

"it was the movie that was doing it. I had caught some kind of disease from the movie... and it was making me grow old... bringing me closer and closer... to death."

And it's the protagonist of this little film that really makes it work. Cronenberg has a habit of sticking with actors he likes, which has resulted in some fascinating lesser-knowns turning up repeatedly in his movies to great effect (see Robert A. Silverman: Rabid, The Brood, Scanners, Naked Lunch & eXistenZ). To that end, here he wisely chose veteran Canadian character actor Leslie Carlson, with whom he'd worked on three previous films. They'd collaborated before on The Fly & The Dead Zone - but most famously on Videodrome, where Carlson memorably portrayed the sleazy, sinister Barry Convex. Also of note to fans of Canadian genre film, Carlson began his career in two Canuck horror classics, Bob Clark's Black Christmas & Alan Ormsby's Deranged (above right).

In this little film he gives it his all (and that's a considerable amount), and his performance is memorable and emotionally affecting. Pretty amazing, given the film's brief running time of only six minutes. In fact, it's surprising how profound & moving this little piece is - an obvious testament to Cronenberg's brilliance and Carlson's skills. Please download the short below, it's a really nice quality AVI at about 100MB. And remember, your reality is already half video hallucination. If you're not careful, it will become total hallucination. The tumor is growing.

CAMERA

CONTACT: Human Horror

Jeremiah Kipp's impressive short film Contact has recently garnered him enough attention to land him his first feature length directorial job (Swine, featuring Tom Savini in a juicy role as a homicidal maniac!)... and it's not hard to see why. It's also earned raves from horror legends Frank Henenlotter and Larry Fessenden, among others.

Beautifully shot in dreamlike black & white, the film features excellent performances, particularly from it's lead, New York actress Zoe Daelman Chlanda. Although almost completely dialogue-free, the outstanding cast convey all the subtle emotion required to make Contact a thought provoking and memorable experience. Personally, I was blown away by the oppressive, sinister sound design, that immediately got under my skin and had me paying close attention. I'm a big fan of sound design being a feature in horror movies and this is some of the best work I've heard in ages. The understated score complements it well, and the whole comes off as sounding like Eraserhead if it were scored by Howard Shore circa Videodrome.

So what's on this little horror film's mind? Perhaps you should go watch it first. You can do that HERE. Go ahead, I'll wait...

On the surface Contact appears to be a cautionary tale about the dangers of drugs, but I think at it's heart, the film is more concerned with people, and the ways in which they relate to each other. For me, Contact - as the name implies - is a meditation on the complexities, uncertainties and frailties of relationships. Each segment of the film features distinctly different forms of human interaction - cold, loving, callous, erotic, manipulative and finally caring and forgiving... or is it?


Have you ever looked at a friend, lover or long-term partner, and suddenly thought to yourself "who is this person, and why are we really together?". Realised that your knowledge and understanding of them might only be very superficial, and that you may in fact be sharing your house and life with a total stranger?

It's a very unsettling and tough moment of human realisation, and difficult to face. It's hard because it forces one to look at a very painful truth... that in the end, no matter how many people we surround ourselves with, we are all - every one of us - very much alone. And the ultimate outcome of that fact is that when we die... it's an experience that we all face alone. This is true horror. Primal horror.

I think the hallucinogenic trip that the two lovers at the heart of the film's narrative take together serves to illustrate this perfectly. Profound drug experiences, particularly psychedelic ones, are capable of stripping away our superficial "masks" and exposing a more raw, truthful self beneath. Zoe Daelman Chlanda's character sees through the veneer of her boyfriend's charm, and into an interior that may be more selfish and possessive than he outwardly appears. To recognise ulterior motives in someone you trust can be a very painful experience.

The more disturbing relationship in Contact, however, is between Chlanda's character and her father. His character is cold and difficult to read because he maintains a rigidly controlled exterior. There are indications though, that all is not right between father and daughter. Does she feel guilt for something? Was he abusive? Is his abuse the reason for her freakout while on the drug? The unanswered question about whether their contact at the end is caring and loving, or tainted with something darker makes for a thought provoking conclusion.



I asked Jeremiah a few questions about Contact, and his answers below make for good reading:

EYE: I see some Cronenberg influence in the body horror aspect of the drug hallucinations. Also parts of the minimalist score remind me a little of early Howard Shore, e.g. Videodrome. Is that the case, or am I just projecting?

JK: Cronenberg is one of the masters of the genre, using body horror imagery in a suggestive way. It's impossible not to feel some influence when you're using a gore effect as an extension of a human emotion or fear. In eXistenZ, the Jude Law character expresses a very specific fear of penetration; in The Fly our hero is rotting away and transforming into a giant insect, which can stand in for any number of diseases that eat away a human being. Our main effect was two people kissing and their faces fuse together, so the couple is literally stuck together and the woman has to tear herself away from him - it's a way of dramatizing that fear of connection, and who we are connected to. But while Cronenberg was an inspiration, the image actually was inspired by a painting by Edward Munch called "The Kiss", where lovers are intertwined and seem to be molding into one entity.

While I don't specifically think the great Howard Shore's name came up, the beautifully minimalist score by Tom Burns has been compared to horror movies from the 1970s/80s that were very spare. We didn't talk about other composers; I think Tom was responding to the fact that this movie was pared down to the essential; plot, character, even the image is black and white, so he responded accordingly with his music. But I'm sure he'd be honored and humbled by the comparison to Shore, one of the most powerful film composers of our time.

EYE: I'm a bit slow on ambiguous, subtle plotting and metaphor etc. Can you please elaborate briefly on any subtext, message, or whatever that may exist in the film? Or should it just be taken on face value?

JK: I'm unable to handle ambiguity either. If the movie is open to the viewer for interpretation, I hope it's because the movie is, in fact, very specific. When you're directing actors, they need to understand what the characters want, how they go about getting that, where they come from and where they are going. I don't think it's possible to do that if the logic of the movie is fuzzy. That said, we also pared down the movie to the essential, so it could be told visually instead of through dialogue. The characters are presented as archetypes (the lovers, the parents, the dealer, etc) and because of that, I think the audience has more room to use their imagination. They can fill in a lot, as long as you have retained a logic in your movie no matter how metaphoric it may seem. The subtext has been interpreted as "don't use drugs" or "it's difficult to take an emotional plunge" depending on who is watching the movie. Let's just say that the title of the movie is CONTACT, and that if you ask yourself "how are the characters making contact in each scene?" you'll have an easy road map for navigating the film. I didn't set out to make a deliberately complex movie; I think if read on an intuitive or emotional level, the movie will reveal what it is. I hope people enjoy the film, or are moved, or shaken, or affected in some way; we made this movie for an audience, not for ourselves.

EYE: Are you taking it on the festival circuit?

JK: We decided not to take the film along the festival circuit. I wanted to put it online as an experiment and see if we could potentially find a wider audience that way. I think the web has changed the way short films can get out there into the world. festivals are great, and some international fests have picked up Contact and are screening it. We had fun making subtitles for the two or three lines of dialogue in the movie. But the web was a way of allowing everyone to see the work: audiences, critics, other filmmakers and producers. As it turns out, two producers saw the movie and hired me to direct a feature starring Tom Savini as a result of seeing it online. But I think it's worth pointing out that while we are all very proud of the film, we didn't set out to make a calling card. Contact was made because we set out to make the best film we could, and it was commissioned by a Halloween film festival in New York that only demanded the film had gore and nudity. It was made for an incredibly low budget ($600) and that may have forced us to be more creative than we would have been otherwise.


Check out more on Jeremiah's forthcoming horror feature Swine, starring Tom Savini, at Fangoria here.