10 Years!

Can you believe it? This humble blog I started as a VHS coverbox archive has been chugging along for a decade now. I've recorded hundreds of covers from the home video era, along with documenting everything that has come along in horror since 2007. It's been pretty wild.

I've made a lot of friends and contacts since then that have allowed me to start making my own films as well as program shorts for three festivals. In celebration of The Horror Section's tenth anniversary I wanted to look back at my most visited posts over the years. Let's dive right in, shall we?

Coincidentally, number ten – with over 1400 looks - was an anniversary post itself. Posted three years ago today, it was another reflective list of seven significant accomplishments I'd made since I'd started THS that included finally archiving my mass collection of horror junk, being accredited for film festivals and keeping a regimented routine of writing at least two-hundred posts a year. 2014 was a really good year for me.

You are going to notice that a lot of my top ten posts are reviews of world premiere screenings, mostly from TIFF's Midnight Madness or Montreal's Fantasia. Number nine was for Mike Flanagan's 2013 film, Oculus.

I really love this film because it focuses on the things that make great horror – simplicity, atmosphere and supporting performances. Flanagan has since gone on to further cement himself as one of the genre's top filmmakers. I mean, Gerald's Game! You need mad skills to put that off.

At almost 1600 views, number eight was my review of V/H/S, the 2012 anthology. Toronto After Dark put on a special screening of that in the summer and man, was The Bloor packed that night. Even though the reception of V/H/S was lukewarm, there was some major anticipation for the film. I know I was pumped. I think I prefer Part 2 overall – mainly because of Timo's Safe Haven – but it was great experience, no less.

Number Seven on the list goes to a review of one of my favourite documentaries of recent years, Jake West's Video Nasties: Moral Panic, Censorship and Videotape.

As I commented in my post, the sheer amount of content in this set was ridiculous. In addition to the doc, you had separate features including trailers for every single title on the UK's infamous list. That's seventy-two trailers! I believe this set was initially an import, so for a time it may have been somewhat rare on this side of the pond – hence the almost 1700 views.

The sixth highest hits was for one of my first posts, coming only three days after THS's inception. It was a list of Ten Great Modern Horror Films that included the likes of The Descent, Session 9 and The Devil's Backbone. I had previously written about these movies on different review sites (now long gone) but at the onset, I wanted to pull together a best-of-the-best into one definitive list.

Number Five is a bit inexplicable, but the first of three Fantasia posts was for Patrick Laugier's follow-up to Martyrs, The Tall Man in 2012.

This film gets a lot of disinterest or disdain, mainly for not being Martyrs 2, but I remember Jessica Biel's performance really knocked my socks off. It was a good precursor to the great work she did more recently in The Sinner.

Coming in at over 2000 views at number four, is my post for Fantasia's world premiere in 2014 of Leo Gabriadze's film Cybernatural. This film was really wild, in that it didn't seem to care that it was infringing on so many copyrights it made my head spin. Google, YouTube and Facebook were all utilized in this micro-budget flick about a vengeful spirit killing teenagers off via Skype.

It was later released in an altered form as the re-branded Unfriended, which judging from the people who saw both was highly inferior. I imagine the high amount of my hits were due to the fact I would've been one of only a few hundred people that would've seen this first cut. I'll never forget that bat-shit scene where a girl is murdered within her Facebook feed, her animated sprite banging around inside her own desktop.

At number three, with over 2500 hits, is my most viewed Midnight Madness review for 2010's Insidious.

It's a franchise now, but seven years ago, the horror community was buzzing over this creeper from James Wan & Leigh Whannell. They had taken the festival circuit by storm six years earlier with Saw and everybody was curious to see whether they could repeat. I actually re-watched Insidious from my Ithaca hotel room last month and I was glad to see that it holds up. I believe the ending was changed from the premiere, but a lot of what these guys executed in this film have become Blumhouse touchstones.

Runner up, is my most viewed review was that of Steven R. Monroe's 2010 remake of I Spit On Your Grave.

An unpleasant film to be sure, but as a remake it's mostly successful because it fixed the problem I always had with the original. The focus of the 1978 movie was the rape, and not the revenge whereas Monroe took a more balanced approach. It made sitting through the nasty stuff a bit more palatable when subsequently the bad guys get it back just as good.

I Spit's reputation continues to live on (with two sequels to boot) so I guess it is not surprising almost 3000 people have looked in over the years.

Numero uno on the list with triple the hits of the closest competitor is my piece on James Herbert's Rat Trilogy that kicked off Rat Week.

I guess it makes sense, as I'm always prattling on about James Herbert. He has never been as popular over here as he should have been and I suppose people searching for info would naturally hit on my blog entries. My first Herbert post connected me with esteemed blogger Mermaid Heather and we've continued to keep in touch over the years as we creep by milestone after milestone.

I definitely plan on writing more about rodent-based horror in the future, but one thing at a time. For now, I'll just keep on keepin' on. Stay safe, kiddies.

Trailer Tuesdays: Killing Cars

While at Eyesore Cinema's flea market event last weekend, I picked up this little oddity.

Unfortunately, I later learned it was not about killer sentient cars, or Jürgen Prochnow going around junking said cars...

So yeah, more of an espionage thriller than a horror, but I do like that the first minute of this trailer is basically an eighties music video. What is really confusing is that director Michael Verhoeven's is not related to Paul “RoboCop” Verheoven, but his father was also named Paul and a prolific actor/writer/director in his native Germany. Learn something new every day.

Bloody Mary 2017

Last weekend The Carlton hosted the 2nd annual Bloody Mary Film Festival, which showcases the work of female genre filmmakers from across Canada. In addition to two horror features, the fest also screened two very strong shorts programmes.

I'm always happy to see Larica Pereira's Tik-Tik and Alicia Moses' Undress Me unspool on the big screen because I think they are some of the strongest genre CanCon out there right now.

Bloody Mary offered up a fine pair of double bills with Gigi Saul Geurreros' Bestia and Madre De Dios, and Erica Genereux Smith's A Brief History of the Apocalypse and A Woman on the Telephone.

In terms of first time watches, I was really taken by the character and relationship studies of Ariane Louis-Seize's Wild Skin and Kassandra Tomczyk's Sea Monster.

Kassandra Tomczyk in Sea Monster.

The highlight of the evening was meeting writer/director Morgana McKenzie who was there with her visually dynamic short/music video, Atlas World. I've been a fan of her work for years, so it was cool to finally put a face to the name.

Bloody Mary's future is very promising, in that even though it is a niche within a niche within a niche, the organizers were still able to find such fantastic content. I look forward to year number three!

DKTM 358

Hello all. I hope you are all having a good weekend. Here's what I've got for you this week.

Invading the Popular Consciousness.

YouTuber Jarvis City sent me a cool video recently compiling eighteen minutes worth of references to The Shining from pop culture. You're welcome!

Having done a few of these myself, I know how time intensive they can be. I also give him props for not including The Chickening because that shit hurts my eyes -- and my soul.

On The Vanguard.

Last week, during the Blood in the Snow Film Festival's awards ceremony last weekend, my friend and prolific Canadian actor Ry Barrett was presented with the Vanguard Award in recognition of work in Canadian genre cinema. The award was preceded by a compilation reel of his work compiled by director and compatriot Gabriel Carrer.

I was honoured to have his work in my short films Lively and The Good Samaritan included in there. Ry deserved every bit of this recognition.

Going to the Dogs.

So, what if Reservoir Dogs had had an actual dog? Like a killer dog that showed up at the warehouse mid-film! Well, your prayers have been answered!

Though I haven't seen Dark Summer, I was a fan of Paul Solet's 2009 debut Grace and his weird BMX-western segment in Tales of Halloween, so I'm eager to see what he can do with a larger budget. It appears to be fairly action heavy, which is good, but I guess it comes down to how digital will the antagonist be. Bullet Head releases in theatres and VOD on Dec 8th.

Bloody Short Cuts 2017

The Blood in the Snow Film Festival continued its tradition of showcasing Canadian short filmmakers last weekend, screening almost two-dozen works from coast to coast. Here were some that stood out to me.

Apart from some familiar works from Shock Stock earlier this year, like Carlos Henriques' Human Cattle and Chris Giroux's Scraps, as well as Greg Kovacs' Fun (which I programmed at Saskatoon earlier this month) I was seeing a lot of these for the first time.

Carl Tremblay's Quebecois short The Wolf was really good looking piece of work. Home invasion stories are decidedly becoming a little long in the tooth, but I did like how this one handled the material.

Michael Peterson's Consume was a stark and unwavering tale rooted in actual events in Canadian history. Combining the ugly reality of the residential school system with the legend of the Wendigo, this short paints an ugly portrait that won't soon be forgotten.

On the science fiction side of things, I really enjoyed Daelan Wood's Timebox. A delightful cross between Primer and the The Most Dangerous Game, this was one of those rare occasions where I hoped there might one day be a feature version of this made.

Kalen Artinian's Destruction Makes The World Burn Brighter was another strong showing. While I think some of the subtext went over my head, there's no question he has a commanding grasp of composition and visual storytelling. I was also glad to see he utilized those Mad Max-style landscapes that I see every time I drive out to Hamilton. Frankly, I don't know why those aren't in every horror movie.

It did not surprise me in the least that Best Short honours went to Gigi Saul Guerrero's Bestia. She's been tearing up the festival circuit for a while now and this latest piece is her most striking yet. Having moved from her previous dark and grimy interiors into the British Columbian wilderness, the scope has increased, but her signature grit and texture are still as present as ever. At this point, her jump to feature filmmaking has to be imminent.

So that's it for this year. I have to hand out mad props to Kelly Micheal Stewart and his crew for putting together a really solid year. It may honestly be the strongest yet, which becomes even more impressive when you consider that Toronto After Dark scooped almost double the amount of CanCon they usually do (five titles) earlier this year. I guess the resulting winning line-up is a testament to just how much great genre content The Great White North is pumping out now.

And with that, festival season is finally over. I can relax for a few weeks before I have to start screening shorts for Hexploitation Film Fest in March. But before then there's Little Terrors in January. And the Black Museum debate in a few weeks. And the Paperbacks From Hell show tonight.

It never ends, does it?

Bless The Child

On Saturday, Blood in the Snow screened two creepy kid flicks, the first of which being Jennifer Phillips' debut effort, Blood Child.

After suffering a miscarriage in Singapore, Ashley (Alyx Melone) with the help of her maid Siti (Cynthia Lee MacQuarrie) make a pact with a witch doctor to bring forth a “ghost child”. But as time goes by, it becomes increasingly difficult to control, especially when Ashley becomes pregnant again.

I am hoping that Phillips is the beginning of a new cycle of bringing lesser known South East Asian folklore to the West (much like up-and-comer Larica Pereira did with her short film Tik-Tik last year). I found the whole concept of the ghost child fascinating, especially when Phillips explained at the Q&A that this is an actual practice in Singapore. When not filtered through the lens of a studio (like say last year's The Forest), delving into these customs comes off as a lot more sincere.

Alyx Melone as Ashley in Blood Child.

Blood Child was definitely at its strongest when it was dwelling on its lore. It was when Phillips fell back on generic horror conventions – and the usual trappings and logic gaps that plague these kind of supernatural thrillers – that it was less interesting to me. I liked it well enough though, even if it did end rather abruptly in a manner I wasn't crazy about.

Something I found unique was the pairing of the housewife and the maid. In most horror films, the maid would be played as an antagonist, but this duo were intrinsically linked by the pact they had made. Cynthia Lee MacQuarrie accomplished a lot with very little dialogue beyond “yes ma'am” and I spent most of the film trying to place why the lead Alyx Melone seemed so familiar. It finally dawned on me that she possessed both the looks of fellow Canuck Tristan Risk and the mannerisms of Heather Lankenkamp. Everyone else in the film just seemed to be circling in an ineffectual orbit around these two the whole film.

Cast & crew of Blood Child. Photo courtesy of Joe MK.

I think the core of Blood Child, built around its compelling folk tale and two strong leads, was solid, even if some of the interstitials fell flat at times. I'm all for the effort though. We need an infusion of new things that go bump in the night beyond the usual revolving door of CGI apparitions, flesh eaters and dudes in animal masks.

Blurring The Line.

Next up on the Blood in the Snow docket was Rob Grant's documentary Fake Blood.

An attempt to make a documentary about whether cinematic violence inspires the same in real-life pulls two filmmakers (Grant & Mike Kovac) into some very dark places.

Fake Blood was a very clever documentary. It was not only a piece about violence in film, but also the nature of filmmaking itself in that often you set out to make one thing and it, seemingly on its own, morphs into something else entirely. This was a perfect example of people chasing a story and falling down a rabbit hole into imminent danger. I found it very difficult to discern – without any context – how much of this documentary was fact, and what was fiction. I mean, I know it must have been, as there are three credited writers on the project, but it was so well crafted.

As storytellers, Grant and Kovac do a commendable job of setting the stage, using a weird fan video they received about the correct way to dismember a body (in response to seeing it done in Grant's previous film Mon Ami) as a jumping off point for their exploration into their responsibility as filmmakers when dealing with violent material. This was all very natural with nothing showy about it.

Later on in the film when they encountered a, let's say shady, individual, the ensuing dramatizations were consistent with every true crime show you've ever watched. Just when I had been sucked in by them, Grant, in a stroke of genius, pulled back the curtain to remind you that you were watching a recreation of a recreation. My brain was constantly trying to access how much of this was real and that's the mark of a good film.

Director Rob Grant with John Doe.

Fake Blood was definitely the most realistic doc I've seen in on this topic since J.T. Petty's 2006 faux-snuff doc S&Man. Unfortunately with Grant's film, I didn't get the luxury of having Petty point out his on-screen antagonist in the front-row after the screening. Until someone tells me definitively and I can breathe the sigh of “well of course that wasn't real”, this doc will be clanking around in my head for sometime.