Editorials
Celebrating 15 Years of Horror at Fantastic Fest!
This year marks the 15th anniversary of Fantastic Fest, the largest genre film festival in the United States. Founded in 2005 by Tim League, Paul Alvarado-Dykstra, Tim McCanlies and Harry Knowles (the latter of whom is no longer associated with the festival), Fantastic Fest focuses on genre films such as horror, science fiction, fantasy, action, Asian, and cult, making it somewhat of a safe haven for genre aficionados. Over the course of eight days more than 80 feature films and 75 short films screen for the festival-goers hungry for some of the weirdest (and Fantastic) films cinema has to offer.
In celebration of this momentous occasion, we dug through the archives of Fantastic Fest’s previous screenings to reminisce about the best horror films to screen there each year. First up, 2005!
2005
Wolf Creek | Pulse | Marebito
Winner: Wolf Creek
A film festival’s first year is more of a dry run for future years. This is evidenced by the small amount of films that screened at Fantastic Fest’s debut. The most notable horror films to screen that year were a dismal J-horror remake, an early Takashi Shimizu (Ju-On) film and Greg McLean’s (The Belko Experiment, Rogue) feature directorial debut. It should come as no surprise that Wolf Creek wins this round. It’s a brutal, terrifying Australian horror film that pulls no punches.
2006
Winner: Bug
Many will cry foul that Bong Joon-ho’s brilliant The Host doesn’t win out here, but William Friedkin’s (The Exorcist) adaptation of Tracy Letts’ play of the same name is a masterful examination of paranoid schizophrenia that is as compelling as it is disturbing (Ashley Judd’s climactic “queen mother bug” monologue is one for the books). It’s just too bad the marketing for the film sold it as an actual killer bug movie. Audiences rewarded the deception with an all-too-rare F CinemaScore.
2007
Wrong Turn 2: Dead End | Spiral | Inside
Winner: Inside
Julien Maury and Alexandre Bustillo’s contribution to the New French Extremity movement is considered one of the best horror films ever made, and for good reason. This home invasion film about a woman (Béatrice Dalle) who will stop at nothing to get the baby inside her target (Alysson Paradis) is a blood-soaked extravaganza that should satisfy even the hungriest of gorehounds. Stay far away from that American remake, though.
2008
Deadgirl | Let the Right One In | Martyrs
Winner: Martyrs
Two years in a row of French films! Though Tomas Alfredson’s swedish vampire tale is wonderful, it doesn’t have the lasting impact that Pascal Laugier’s polarizing Martyrs, which is why it gets the slight edge. Can you imagine seeing this film in a packed theater?
2009
Antichrist | Daybreakers | The Human Centipede (First Sequence) | [REC] 2 | Trick ‘r Treat | Zombieland
Winner: [REC] 2
Sure, [REC] is a masterpiece of Spanish horror (and found footage) cinema, but the sequel is arguably the superior film as it expands upon the mythology of the original and adds in a nice third-act twist. Plus, it’s scary.
2010
Hatchet II | Let Me In | Mother’s Day | Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale
Winner: Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale
Jalmari Helnader’s debut feature manages to do the impossible: make a good horror film about a murderous Santa Claus. Sure, we all get a good laugh out of Santa’s Slay, but Rare Exports takes a less cheesy approach to the material, injecting some dark comedy into the Christmas horror of it all.
2011
The Human Centipede II (Full Sequence) | The Innkeepers | You’re Next
Winner: You’re Next
Festival-goers fortunate enough to see Adam Wingard’s You’re Next during its 2011 festival run were lucky souls indeed, seeing as how the film didn’t see a theatrical release until August of 2013. This clever little subversion of the home invasion sub-genre was a crowd-pleaser of the highest order, giving audiences a heroine (Sharni Vinson) they could really root for.
2012
American Mary | The Collection | Frankenweenie | Paranormal Activity 4 | Sinister
Winner: American Mary
The Soska Sisters’ sophomore feature (following their 2009 film Dead Hooker in a Trunk) boasts a career-defining performance from Katherine Isabelle (Ginger Snaps) as Mary, a medical student who begins performing underground body modification surgeries in order to pay her way through school. It’s not an easy watch (especially as it dabbles into rape revenge territory), but it’s not a film you’ll soon forget.
2013
All the Boys Love Mandy Lane | Cheap Thrills | Escape From Tomorrow | The Sacrament | We Are What We Are
Winner: All the Boys Love Mandy Lane
Poor Jonathan Levine (Long Shot, 50/50). His All the Boys Love Mandy Lane made waves at TIFF in 2006 and earned positive word-of-mouth. Unfortunately, it was quickly secured for distribution by Senator Entertainment, which went bankrupt shortly thereafter and left the film in limbo for seven years. It finally saw a limited theatrical release in October of 2013, but not before one final festival screening at Fantastic Fest in September of that same year. Seven years of hype hurt the film’s reception, but this doesn’t mean that Mandy Lane isn’t capable of standing on its own. It’s one of the more stylish slashers to be get released in the past 15 years.
2014
The Babadook | Dead Snow 2: Red Vs. Dead | It Follows | Horns | Housebound | Spring | The Town That Dreaded Sundown | Tusk | V/H/S Viral
Winner: It Follows
2014 was a pretty phenomenal year for Fantastic Fest, as evidenced by all of the films listed above. This is the year that Fantastic Fest clearly established itself as a prestigious genre film festival. While Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook is a standout of that year, it’s David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows that emerges victorious. This insanely terrifying film is not only the best film of the festival that year, but it’s also one of the best films, horror or otherwise, of the decade.
2015
Baskin | Bone Tomahawk | The Devil’s Candy | The Blackcoat’s Daughter | The Invitation | Southbound | The Witch
Winner: The Invitation
You need only look at my review for Karyn Kusama’s superb The Invitation to know that, even amidst Oz Perkins’ chilling The Blackcoat’s Daughter (then still called February) and Robert Eggers’ The Witch, I consider it one of the very best films of the 21st century. This tense tale of a dinner party gone wrong plays with viewer expectations masterfully before a third-act reveal that blows everything up in the viewer’s face. After the poor critical and commercial reception of Aeon Flux and Jennifer’s Body (the latter of which has received a reappraisal in the past year or so), Kusama needed a hit. The Invitation was that hit.
2016
The Autopsy of Jane Doe | The Girl With All the Gifts | The Lure | Phantasm: Ravager | Raw | Better Watch Out | The Void
Winner: Better Watch Out
If anyone else was writing this article, Raw would win this round. But it’s me, and that means Better Watch Out (my review), Chris Peckover’s twisted take on Home Alone, wins out. This ultra-dark comedy manages to subvert viewer expectations multiple times throughout its 89-minute runtime (if they haven’t watched the spoiler-filled trailer, that is), inspiring gasps and guffaws in the process.
2017
Anna and the Apocalypse | The Endless | Gerald’s Game | Good Manners | Revenge | Thelma | Thoroughbreds | Tigers Are Not Afraid
Winner: Tigers Are Not Afraid
It’s a shame that it took so long for Issa López’s dark fable this long to get released (it premiered on Shudder just last week), because it’s one of the more touching horror(ish) films to emerge from Fantastic Fest since its inception. Tigers Are Not Afraid tells the story of five children trying to survive the drug wars taking place in Mexico, expertly blending horror, fantasy and reality into a near-perfect film.
2018
Apostle | Cam | Climax | Halloween | In Fabric | Knife + Heart | Lords of Chaos | One Cut of the Dead | Overlord | The Perfection | Terrified
Winner: The Perfection
2019
The word is still out on what will be the best horror film at Fantastic Fest’s fifteenth year, but there is no shortage of horror films to choose from. Keep an eye out for reviews from Meagan Navarro and myself over the next week to see which films earn our recommendations!
Fantastic Fest 2019 will take place in Austin, Texas from September 19-September 26.
The penultimate season of Tales from the Crypt (1989–1996) aired its first three episodes on October 31, so it’s understandable that at least one of those three stories is set on Halloween.
Sandwiched between “Let the Punishment Fit the Crime” (Russell Mulcahy, Ron Finley) and “Whirlpool” (Mick Garris, A. L. Katz & Gilbert Adler) is the most severe episode of the bunch. Maybe the entire series? William Malone and Dick Beebe’s “Only Skin Deep” traded the show’s typical sense of fun for startling amounts of bleakness and kink.
“Only Skin Deep” is, apart from the Crypt Keeper’s intro and outro, noticeably unfunny. There are no considerable attempts at making the viewer laugh. Come to think of it, if those bookends had been replaced, and there was more of a sci-fi element in the story, HBO could have easily squeezed this tale into that successor anthology, Perversions of Science (1997). In Crypt, though, “Only Skin Deep” is much too grim for an audience that had become accustomed to campiness and levity.
What makes “Only Skin Deep” feel dark, among other things, is its protagonist. Showing up to a Halloween party where he’s not welcome, and where his former girlfriend (Diane DiLasco) is attending, Carl Schlag (Peter Onorati) first comes across as your standard bitter ex. You soon realize it’s much worse than that, once Carl threatens Linda (“You know, silly me, thinking I gave you what you deserved. If I’d have done that, I’d have killed you”). Now, I haven’t forgotten that Tales from the Crypt was teeming with vile men who did women harm. Yet Carl’s brand of misogynistic menace hits differently—it borders on being too realistic for this kind of series.
Mike Vosburg’s EC-style comic cover for “Only Skin Deep”, as seen in the Tales from the Crypt episode.
Despite donning a party mask for much of the episode, Carl can’t ever mask his true nature. The invitation did say “come as you are”, after all. That inability to change and be better, however, is why Carl ends up in such a karmic predicament. His outburst of anger at the party attracts the attention of one loner partygoer named Molly (Sherrie Rose, who was also in Season Four’s “On a Deadman’s Chest”). Her bone-white, featureless “mask” and body-bag costume don’t initially register as too strange, especially on a night like this. But at a party chock-full of colorful, cartoonish, and lighthearted ensembles, it does look out of place.
Darkness attracts darkness as Carl ditches the party and accompanies the mysterious Molly to her place. Which, by the way, should have been an immediate red flag. But perhaps she’s so hot, he doesn’t seem to mind the serial killer aesthetic. Resembling a warehouse that has been converted into living spaces, but never then decorated to remove the cold, industrial look, Molly’s home (or lair) is as gloomy as this whole episode feels. It’s like the set of a grungy music video, albeit a tad cleaner. The environments in a typical Crypt episode tend to be small, overfilled, and broken-in. Warm, regardless of any weird goings-on. All that empty space in Molly’s hovel, on the other hand, elicits a creepy feeling that Carl was unwise to ignore.
Tales from the Crypt featured more sex than it didn’t, but hands down, “Only Skin Deep” boasts the steamiest scene in the show’s history. Pushing it over the line, in addition to Onorati showing bare buns and the camera never turning down one of his pelvic thrusts, is the twisted dirty talk. Carl stays in the moment, whereas Molly unleashes charged lines like “the hurt, the anger, give it to me” and “take it out on my flesh like you want to”. It’s all quite kinky, as well as tied into the story’s theme of pain.
How else “Only Skin Deep” differs from other episodes is its twists. Or rather, its lack thereof. Nothing comes as a great surprise here, particularly because the deuteragonist’s ulterior motives are so obvious. By no means is Molly a wolf in sheep’s clothing; her face is a fright mask, she practically reeks of death, and she lives in what can best be described as a serial killer’s hideout. That last-act revelation of Molly’s mask really being her face is also nothing shocking. Cleverness is certainly not this episode’s strength.
A page from “…Only Skin Deep!”, as seen in EC Comics’ Tales from the Crypt.
While “Only Skin Deep” isn’t the most universally loved episode of Tales from the Crypt, it’s an interesting preview of William Malone’s future as a director. Most notably, he went on to helm House on Haunted Hill (1999) and FeardotCom (2002), the former of which was co-written by Dick Beebe, this episode’s writer. Dark Castle Entertainment, that genre house founded by Crypt producers Joel Silver, Robert Zemeckis, and Gilbert Adler, was instrumental in bringing out Malone’s gruesome, over-the-top vision in House on Haunted Hill. However, FeardotCom and Malone’s Masters of Horror episode, “Fair-Haired Child”, are the most stylistically compatible with “Only Skin Deep”.
As one might guess, this episode is nothing like its source material. The “…Only Skin Deep!” found in the pages of EC Comics is set during Mardi Gras in New Orleans, and save for its last couple of pages, is pretty sweet in nature. There, a man named Herbert is enamored with a woman he met five years prior to the present-day story. Every year, he has come down to Mardi Gras to see Suzanne, who’s always dressed as a hag-faced witch. Well, this time, Herbert plans on popping the question and marrying someone who is, for the most part, a total stranger. Suzanne accepts his proposal, but with one condition: they stay in costume until they’re officially hitched. You can probably see where this is going…
Once they are married, Suzanne remains incognito, even when she and Herbert have consummated their vows. A semi-predictive nightmare then rattles Herbert; he dreamt that Suzanne’s real face was as wizened as her mask. Finally, in his haste to find out the truth, Herbert winds up killing his new wife. Faceless and well on her way to bleeding out, the dying Suzanne manages to say she never wore a mask.
For more traditional EC-style ghastliness, your best bet is reading the comic. It’s wickedly sad. For something less conventional, as far as Tales from the Crypt goes, the role-reversing adaptation is worth watching. It’s not the best this show had to offer, although Malone’s visual style, plus the sexual abandon, does set the episode apart. If nothing else, “Only Skin Deep” leaves an impression that, even years later, shows no signs of fading.
Season Six of Tales from the Crypt can be streamed on Shudder, starting on June 5.
Tales from Tales from the Crypt celebrates the show’s Shudder premiere by singling out one episode from each season. So don’t even think about changing that dial, boys and ghouls. More spot-“frights” are to come.
Carl discovers Molly’s collection of human ‘masks’ in the Tales from the Crypt episode, “Only Skin Deep”.
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