There’s been a surge in recent years of horror directors tackling social media influencer culture and #chadgetstheaxe is the newest attempt and succeeds largely because of its dedication to the authenticity of recreating the live stream experience through it’s personalities, chat integration and slick editing. Opening with one influencer, Steve Spice, showing his followers (dubbed “The Spice Squad”) an abandoned […]
Invoking Yell was a hit at the sixth annual Unnamed Footage Festival this year in San Francisco, and is currently making the festival rounds. Director Patricio Valladares was kind enough to sit down with us to answer some questions about the film and discuss his love of metal, as well as other projects he’s been working on. So put on […]
“I would equate it to like organs inside a body, you need all the organs to match together to pump whatever goo is inside your body like pee, and blood.” These are the colorful words Alfred Costella (Vinny Curran, Resolution) uses to describe what a film is, in terms of working parts, when asked by a talk show host (Bill […]
The main ingredient necessary for any successful reality television show is an eclectic set of contestants that producers can weave interesting narratives around through exploiting their problematic or dramatic character traits which reveal themselves during the paranoia-fueled, high-stress conditions these shows often foster. It feels strikingly authentic but remains a “safe” viewing experience because audiences know that it’s controlled to […]
Patricio Valladares’ Invoking Yell, which screened as part of the sixth annual Unnamed Footage Festival’s lineup, takes us back to the 1990s and the then burgeoning black metal scene. Across Europe, the black metal scene had church burnings, murders, and suicides. Valladares brings his own spin on scene drama to Chile and the self-described “depressive suicidal black metal band”, Invoking […]
Cleverly dropping viewers into the film within the film, Timothée Hochet and Lucas Pastor’s debut feature Stéphane opens mid-scene as an up and coming director named Timothée (Bastien Garcia delivering a perfectly nuanced debut feature performance) shoots his latest action-packed, espionage short. He and his actors are interrupted by a peculiar man named Stéphane (Lucas Pastor himself, unrecognizable under makeup) […]
A superbly edited travel montage doubling as an opening credits sequence stylishly opens John Ainslie’s sophomore feature film Do Not Disturb, as viewers are effectively introduced to the South Florida setting and lead characters in the process. Chloe (Kimberly Laferriere of In The Dark, injecting a great deal of nuance into her show-stealing performance) and Jack (Rogan Christopher of 2018’s […]
Alexis Bruchon’s The Eyes Below is an experimental horror film that for the vast majority of the runtime, takes place in a bed. On top of that, there is almost no dialogue beyond screams, grunts, and exasperated sighs. This isn’t going to be for everyone, but it was a fascinating watch. Eugène (played by Vinicius Coelho) gets into bed but […]
Scott Slone’s decade-plus-long endeavor Malibu Horror Story opens by revealing a team of young paranormal researchers in a remote Malibu Canyon cave who are recording the pilot episode of their web series. They’re preparing for the inaugural EVP session and in the process describe their roster of standard spirit hunting tech, including the spirit box they’ll use to communicate with […]
Cringe-inducing body horror delivered via a tightly-paced, timely thriller about a queer couple smuggling drugs across an international border surely isn’t something anyone had on their horror movie bingo cards, though it’s exactly what Carter Smith’s Swallowed shoots for and achieves with flying colors. The film opens with a hypnotic credits sequence intercut with the leads dancing in a club, […]