Movies
‘Celluloid Screams’ Heard From Sheffield and a Festival Poster to Die For
With the best month for horror fans fast approaching, that call to the movie theatre to watch something sinister & scary whistles through the collective mind of every Tom, Dickhead & Harry. It’s always a risk taking that trip to the multiplex for a horror flick that could end with idiots adding their own commentary & light source to the feature presentation. The humble film festival is generally a haven to watch movies with those in the same mind set, ready to respect the silver screen by powering off their portable one. The UK has a particularly nice cinematic event path across the Queen’s fair land. Northern England’s Celluloid Screams just announced their line up along with a beautiful quad poster to banner their 6th annual edition.
From the press release:
Celluloid Screams: Sheffield Horror Film Festival, Friday 23 – Sunday 25 October 2015, returns to Showroom Cinema for its sixth edition, with a weekend packed full of the best new and classic horror. We are very pleased to announce the programme for Celluloid Screams 2015 in what is set to be the festival’s best year yet.
Here’s the full lineup of what’s in store for Celluloid Screams 2015…
CLAUDIO SIMONETTI’S GOBLIN performing PROFONDO ROSSO LIVE (SHEFFIELD HALLAM UNIVERSITY CLOSING GALA)
Director: Dario Argento | Italy | 1975 | 2hrs 6 mins
For our centrepiece event for 2015, we are delighted to welcome our guests of honour, Claudio Simonetti’s Goblin to perform a live rescore of Dario Argento’s seminal 1975 film. One night, musician Marcus Daly (David Hemmings, Blow Up) witnesses the brutal axe murder of a woman in her apartment. Racing to the scene, Marcus just manages to miss the perpetrator… or does he? As he takes on the role of amateur sleuth, Marcus finds himself ensnared in a bizarre web of murder and mystery where nothing is what it seems…OPENING GALA: THE INVITATION
Director: Karyn Kusama | USA | 2015 | 1hr 37 minsWhen Will (Logan Marshall-Green) is invited to a dinner party at his former home, he is haunted by the memories of a family tragedy that led to his separation from his ex-wife Eden, who is now remarried. As Will reconnects with Eden, their mutual friends and her new husband David, he begins to suspect that something is very, very wrong and that Eden and David may have ulterior and altogether more sinister motives for gathering them all together.
GOODNIGHT MOMMY (UK PREMIERE)
Director: Severin Fiala, Veronika Franz | Austria | 2014 | 1hr 39 minsIn the confines of their ultra-modern rural home, twin brothers Lukas and Elias await the return of their mother, who has undergone cosmetic surgery. When she arrives, their mother’s face is covered with bandages and her behaviour seems erratic, leading the twins to suspect that the woman under the bandages is not their mother at all but an imposter. Disconnected from the outside world, Elias and Lukas decide to take matters into their own hands to find out the truth about the identity of the woman claiming to be their mother.
YAKUZA APOCALYPSE
Director: Takashi Miike | Japan | 2015 | 1hr 55 minsJapanese gangster lore and bloodsucking vampires collide in this mindboggling opus from Japanese master of mayhem Takashi Miike! In the shadowy underworld of the yakuza, no one is more renowned and feared than boss Kamiura, due in no small part to the fact that he is secretly a vampire. However, when Kamiura is slain by a mysterious assassin from a crime syndicate, his most dedicated disciple vows to take revenge on those responsible. With bone-crunching violence, outrageous gore and trademark Miike flourishes, Yakuza Apocalypse has come to mangle your brain.
THEY LOOK LIKE PEOPLE
Director: Perry Blackshear | USA | 2015 | 80 minsTroubled individual Wyatt turns up on the doorstep of his old friend Christian, in an attempt to reconnect their friendship. After spending some much-needed time together, it emerges that Wyatt has a deep-seated suspicion that those around him are actually malevolent shape-shifters. They look like people… but they’re not. Wyatt begins to question whether he needs to protect his only friend from an impending war, or from himself.
HE NEVER DIED
Director: Jason Krawczyk | USA/Canada | 2015 | 1 hr 39 mins
An exceptionally prolonged life brings depression and a detachment – No one knows this better than Jack. He buys stolen blood from a hospital intern, plays bingo daily, sleeps fourteen hours a day, watches television six hours a day, and lives alone. This is his life and he has shelled himself away from social interactions. The fuse is lit when Jack’s past comes back to rattle him. Jack must now walk the tight rope of sobriety and try to eat as few people as possible in this violent and comical tale of personal responsibility, self worth and cannibalism.
EXCESS FLESH
Director: Patrick Kennelly | USA | 2015 | 1 hr 43 mins
After last year’s Starry Eyes took aim at the Hollywood star factory, Excess Flesh casts a similarly scathing light on the LA fashion scene. The story centres on two young women; stick-thin, bitchy model Jennifer, and the average-size Jill, whose jealousy of her roommate leads to binging and purging to maintain her weight. The tension builds and Jennifer resorts to mocking Jill’s issues, causing the rivalry and recrimination to come to a head. Jill lashes out and violently imprisons Jennifer in a twisted attempt to bring them closer together.THESE FINAL HOURS
Director: Zak Hilditch | Australia | 2013 | 1hr 27 mins
It’s the last day on earth, twelve hours before a cataclysmic event will end life as we know it. James makes his way across a lawless and chaotic city to the party to end all parties. Along the way, he somewhat reluctantly saves the life of a little girl named Rose who is desperately searching for her father. Stuck with the unexpected burden of responsibility, James is forced to come to terms with what really matters in life as the final hours tick away.
THE WITCH
Director: Robert Eggars | Canada/USA | 2015 | 1hr 30 minutes
New England, 1630: William and Katherine lead a devout Christian life, homesteading on the edge of an impassible wilderness, with five children. When their newborn son mysteriously vanishes and their crops fail, the family begins to turn on one another. ‘The Witch’ is a chilling portrait of a family unraveling within their own fears and anxieties, leaving them prey for an inescapable evil.
CELLULOID SCREAMS SECRET FILM
Director: TBC | Country TBC | Year TBC | Running Time TBCMuch like the alien lifeform in John Carpenter’s The Thing, our annual secret film lies in wait in amongst our lineup waiting to take shape and reveal itself. It could look like anything and you’ll only know what it is as it’s about to begin…
EMELIE
Director: Michael Thelin | USA | 2015 | 1 hr 20 mins
After their regular babysitter can’t make it, the Thompson family turns to her friend Anna to supervise the children while they go out to celebrate their anniversary. At first Anna’s casual attitude proves popular with the kids, who delight at the prospect of playing with things that are usually off-limits. As her behaviour becomes increasingly strange, the Thompson kids discover the dark nature of Anna’s true intentions and realise that they may be in very real danger.
SCARED SAFE: REAL HORROR FROM THE PUBLIC INFORMATION FILM ARCHIVES
Directors: Various | United Kingdom | 1hr 5 minsFor 65 years, the UK government’s Central Office of Information produced marketing literature and films to inform and educate the British public on all manner of subjects, often in dramatic and shocking fashion. This special screening, curated by Celluloid Screams, delves deep into the archives to revisit a selection of public information films that terrified a generation during the 1970s and 1980s.
THE CORPSE OF ANNA FRITZ
Director: Hèctor Hernández Vicens | Spain | 2015 | 1 hr 16 mins
The death of beautiful young actress Anna Fritz sends shockwaves across the world, with fans and media mourning her sudden and unexplained demise. After she is interred at the morgue of a local hospital, Pau, a young orderly takes a photo of the actress’ lifeless body and sends it to his friends, who duly arrive to get a look at her in the flesh. Once alone inside the morgue, one of them suggests they take advantage of their situation, in this frighteningly contemporary horror tale that delves deep into our relentless obsession with celebrity (even in death) and all of the morally reprehensible and horrific attributes that come with it.
DEATHGASM
Director: Jason Lei Howden | New Zealand | 2015 | 1 hr 30 mins
As he tries to escape the mundanity of high school life in a small town, teenage metalhead Brodie strikes up a friendship with the rebellious Zakk, and they decide to form a band with fellow outcasts Dion and Giles. As with any under-qualified teenage metal band, they struggle to capture their ideal sound, that is until they get their hands on an unrecorded song from their death metal idol. After blasting through a rendition of the song in their garage rehearsal room, it becomes clear why the song was left unrecorded, as anyone in earshot transforms into a demon and the boys unwittingly summon an ancient evil entity known as The Blind One. In a town overrun with demons, it’s up to our metalhead heroes to save the world from a satanic apocalypse.
Celluloid Screams: Sheffield Horror Film Festival returns to Showroom Cinema for its sixth edition from Friday 23 – Sunday 25 October 2015, with a weekend packed full of premieres, previews, special guests and more.
CELLULOID SCREAMS CLASSIC ALLNIGHTER III
A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET
Director: Wes Craven | USA | 1984 | 1hr 31 minsThe sad passing of director Wes Craven earlier this year leaves a significant void in the horror pantheon, not least for this film. In the beginning, before Freddy Krueger devolved into the wisecracking cartoonish caricature that he became in the later sequels, he was a terrifying presence that would haunt your dreams (albeit without the ability to kill you) and that effect is still as strong even today. The landscape of contemporary horror would not be the same without Craven’s influence and this screening is dedicated to his memory.
PHANTASM
Director: Don Coscarelli | USA | 1979 | 1hr 28 minsFrom one iconic horror character to another… Shortly after losing his parents, teenager Mike (Michael Baldwin) grows suspicious of a tall man (Angus Scrimm) he sees lifting a coffin single-handed at the local graveyard, and decides to investigate. It turns out that the funeral parlour is being used as an assembly line for zombie slaves, and it is left to Mike, with the aid of his brother Jody (Bill Thornburg) and ice cream man Reggie (Reggie Bannister), to stop them. Screening from an original 35mm archive print.
THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE 2
Director: Tobe Hooper | USA | 1986 | 1 hr 41 minsA cult classic in its own right, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 serves up a heady blend of gruesome gore, socio-political critique and jet-black humour – whilst Dennis Hopper’s unhinged turn as Lefty Enright needs to be seen to be believed! Screening from an original 35mm archive print.
RE-ANIMATOR
Director: Stuart Gordon | USA | 1985 | 1hr 45 minsGory, hilarious and ludicrously entertaining from start to finish, Re-Animator tells the macabre tale of Herbert West, a decidedly peculiar and self righteous medical student (brilliantly played by Jeffrey Combs) who arrives at Miskatonic Medical School with the aim of continuing his highly dubious research into the reanimation of dead tissue. West soon befriends fellow student Dan Cain, who is unwittingly dragged into his twisted experiments, which soon spiral out of control.
CELLULOID SCREAM FESTIVAL PASSES
Passes are on sale now from Showroom Cinema:Celluloid Screams Ultimate Pass (Full weekend pass including the allnighter*) £95/£85 Concessions http://www.showroomworkstation.org.uk/cspass2015
*For anyone not wishing to stay for the allnighter, a reduced rate Celluloid Screams pass (EXCLUDING the allnighter) will be available, priced at £80/£70
Standalone allnighter tickets – £26/£21 concessions http://www.showroomworkstation.org.uk/allnighter
Individual tickets for all films and events, including our closing gala event ‘CLAUDIO SIMONETTI’S GOBLIN perform PROFONDO ROSSO’ will be available on 25th September from http://www.showroomworkstation.org.uk/, by phone on 0114 275 7727 or in person at the Showroom box office.
For all the latest from Celluloid Screams:
http://www.celluloidscreams.co.uk/
http://www.facebook.com/celluloidscreamshorrorfestival
http://twitter.com/sheffhorrorfest
Here’s what we know about Longlegs so far. It’s coming in July of 2024, it’s directed by Osgood Perkins (The Blackcoat’s Daughter), and it features Maika Monroe (It Follows) as an FBI agent who discovers a personal connection between her and a serial killer who has ties to the occult. We know that the serial killer is going to be played by none other than Nicolas Cage and that the marketing has been nothing short of cryptic excellence up to this point.
At the very least, we can assume NEON’s upcoming film is going to be a dark, horror-fueled hunt for a serial killer. With that in mind, let’s take a look at five disturbing serial killers-versus-law-enforcement stories to get us even more jacked up for Longlegs.
MEMORIES OF MURDER (2003)
This South Korean film directed by Oscar-winning director Bong Joon-ho (Parasite) is a wild ride. The film features a handful of cops who seem like total goofs investigating a serial killer who brutally murders women who are out and wearing red on rainy evenings. The cops are tired, unorganized, and border on stoner comedy levels of idiocy. The movie at first seems to have a strange level of forgiveness for these characters as they try to pin the murders on a mentally handicapped person at one point, beating him and trying to coerce him into a confession for crimes he didn’t commit. A serious cop from the big city comes down to help with the case and is able to instill order.
But still, the killer evades and provokes not only the police but an entire country as everyone becomes more unstable and paranoid with each grizzly murder and sex crime.
I’ve never seen a film with a stranger tone than Memories of Murder. A movie that deals with such serious issues but has such fallible, seemingly nonserious people at its core. As the film rolls on and more women are murdered, you realize that a lot of these faults come from men who are hopeless and desperate to catch a killer in a country that – much like in another great serial killer story, Citizen X – is doing more harm to their plight than good.
Major spoiler warning: What makes Memories of Murder somehow more haunting is that it’s loosely based on a true story. It is a story where the real-life killer hadn’t been caught at the time of the film’s release. It ends with our main character Detective Park (Song Kang-ho), now a salesman, looking hopelessly at the audience (or judgingly) as the credits roll. Over sixteen years later the killer, Lee Choon Jae, was found using DNA evidence. He was already serving a life sentence for another murder. Choon Jae even admitted to watching the film during his court case saying, “I just watched it as a movie, I had no feeling or emotion towards the movie.”
In the end, Memories of Murder is a must-see for fans of the subgenre. The film juggles an almost slapstick tone with that of a dark murder mystery and yet, in the end, works like a charm.
CURE (1997)
If you watched 2023’s Hypnotic and thought to yourself, “A killer who hypnotizes his victims to get them to do his bidding is a pretty cool idea. I only wish it were a better movie!” Boy, do I have great news for you.
In Cure (spoilers ahead), a detective (Koji Yakusho) and forensic psychologist (Tsuyoshi Ujiki) team up to find a serial killer who’s brutally marking their victims by cutting a large “X” into their throats and chests. Not just a little “X” mind you but a big, gross, flappy one.
At each crime scene, the murderer is there and is coherent and willing to cooperate. They can remember committing the crimes but can’t remember why. Each of these murders is creepy on a cellular level because we watch the killers act out these crimes with zero emotion. They feel different than your average movie murder. Colder….meaner.
What’s going on here is that a man named Mamiya (Masato Hagiwara) is walking around and somehow manipulating people’s minds using the flame of a lighter and a strange conversational cadence to hypnotize them and convince them to murder. The detectives eventually catch him but are unable to understand the scope of what’s happening before it’s too late.
If you thought dealing with a psychopathic murderer was hard, imagine dealing with one who could convince you to go home and murder your wife. Not only is Cure amazingly filmed and edited but it has more horror elements than your average serial killer film.
MANHUNTER (1986)
In the first-ever Hannibal Lecter story brought in front of the cameras, Detective Will Graham (William Petersen) finds his serial killers by stepping into their headspace. This is how he caught Hannibal Lecter (played here by Brian Cox), but not without paying a price. Graham became so obsessed with his cases that he ended up having a mental breakdown.
In Manhunter, Graham not only has to deal with Lecter playing psychological games with him from behind bars but a new serial killer in Francis Dolarhyde (in a legendary performance by Tom Noonan). One who likes to wear pantyhose on his head and murder entire families so that he can feel “seen” and “accepted” in their dead eyes. At one point Lecter even finds a way to gift Graham’s home address to the new killer via personal ads in a newspaper.
Michael Mann (Heat, Thief) directed a film that was far too stylish for its time but that fans and critics both would have loved today in the same way we appreciate movies like Nightcrawler or Drive. From the soundtrack to the visuals to the in-depth psychoanalysis of an insanely disturbed protagonist and the man trying to catch him. We watch Graham completely lose his shit and unravel as he takes us through the psyche of our killer. Which is as fascinating as it is fucked.
Manhunter is a classic case of a serial killer-versus-detective story where each side of the coin is tarnished in their own way when it’s all said and done. As Detective Park put it in Memories of Murder, “What kind of detective sleeps at night?”
INSOMNIA (2002)
Maybe it’s because of the foggy atmosphere. Maybe it’s because it’s the only film in Christopher Nolan’s filmography he didn’t write as well as direct. But for some reason, Insomnia always feels forgotten about whenever we give Nolan his flowers for whatever his latest cinematic achievement is.
Whatever the case, I know it’s no fault of the quality of the film, because Insomnia is a certified serial killer classic that adds several unique layers to the detective/killer dynamic. One way to create an extreme sense of unease with a movie villain is to cast someone you’d never expect in the role, which is exactly what Nolan did by casting the hilarious and sweet Robin Williams as a manipulative child murderer. He capped that off by casting Al Pacino as the embattled detective hunting him down.
This dynamic was fascinating as Williams was creepy and clever in the role. He was subdued in a way that was never boring but believable. On the other side of it, Al Pacino felt as if he’d walked straight off the set of 1995’s Heat and onto this one. A broken and imperfect man trying to stop a far worse one.
Aside from the stellar acting, Insomnia stands out because of its unique setting and plot. Both working against the detective. The investigation is taking place in a part of Alaska where the sun never goes down. This creates a beautiful, nightmare atmosphere where by the end of it, Pacino’s character is like a Freddy Krueger victim in the leadup to their eventual, exhausted death as he runs around town trying to catch a serial killer while dealing with the debilitating effects of insomnia. Meanwhile, he’s under an internal affairs investigation for planting evidence to catch another child killer and accidentally shoots his partner who he just found out is about to testify against him. The kicker here is that the killer knows what happened that fateful day and is using it to blackmail Pacino’s character into letting him get away with his own crimes.
If this is the kind of “what would you do?” intrigue we get with the story from Longlegs? We’ll be in for a treat. Hoo-ah.
FALLEN (1998)
Fallen may not be nearly as obscure as Memories of Murder or Cure. Hell, it boasts an all-star cast of Denzel Washington, John Goodman, Donald Sutherland, James Gandolfini, and Elias Koteas. But when you bring it up around anyone who has seen it, their ears perk up, and the word “underrated” usually follows. And when it comes to the occult tie-ins that Longlegs will allegedly have? Fallen may be the most appropriate film on this entire list.
In the movie, Detective Hobbs (Washington) catches vicious serial killer Edgar Reese (Koteas) who seems to place some sort of curse on him during Hobbs’ victory lap. After Reese is put to death via electric chair, dead bodies start popping up all over town with his M.O., eventually pointing towards Hobbs as the culprit. After all, Reese is dead. As Hobbs investigates he realizes that a fallen angel named Azazel is possessing human body after human body and using them to commit occult murders. It has its eyes fixated on him, his co-workers, and family members; wrecking their lives or flat-out murdering them one by one until the whole world is damned.
Mixing a demonic entity into a detective/serial killer story is fascinating because it puts our detective in the unsettling position of being the one who is hunted. How the hell do you stop a demon who can inhabit anyone they want with a mere touch?!
Fallen is a great mix of detective story and supernatural horror tale. Not only are we treated to Denzel Washington as the lead in a grim noir (complete with narration) as he uncovers this occult storyline, but we’re left with a pretty great “what would you do?” situation in a movie that isn’t afraid to take the story to some dark places. Especially when it comes to the way the film ends. It’s a great horror thriller in the same vein as Frailty but with a little more detective work mixed in.
Look for Longlegs in theaters on July 12, 2024.
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