26-29th April
Edinburgh Filmhouse

Well, here we go again.  A thrilling weekend showcasing the finest, craziest, goriest, weirdest, most fucked up independent & world cinema titles around – yes, this overlong, rambling & occasionally coherent piece you’re currently reading is my (your?) now-annual coverage of the Dead by Dawn Horror Film Festival in Edinburgh.  Now in its 14th year, the festival is treasurable for its ability to give big screen exposure to distributor-less titles, & giving increasing coverage to otherwise impossible to see shorts, rather than simply indulging in glossy over-hyped packages that will be coming to multiplexes everywhere in a couple of weeks anyway.  Most of the films screened may pop up on DVD in a year or two, some you’ll probably never see again, but all are given life on the big screen where they belong.  Whilst in fairness occasionally there are films you wouldn’t want to see again, quality control is usually pretty good (kudos to festival director Adele Hartley for her consistent good bad taste!), & this year the standard was the highest it’s been for a couple of years, with a couple of cracking sleepers & nary a true dud in sight.

There was another slight increase in price this year to £60 for a weekend pass, which is still pretty decent value for the amount of films you get, although it’s perhaps noticeable that whereas the last couple of years have sold-out quickly, uptake this year was rather slower.   Unlike some other festivals the full pass with tickets for everything is the only option, although you may be able to buy stand-by tickets at the start of individual films if they become available.  Perhaps partly to combat the price increase (& a factor which undoubtedly affected the speed of sales of the full pass), a shorter option was also available - £25 for ‘Spawn of Dawn’, a 5-film all-nighter on Saturday, taking in the best of the programme.

The festival kicked off on Thursday the 26th at 2315.  Due to the late start, I decided to precede it with a screening of Danny Boyle’s ‘Sunshine’.  This is nothing to do with the festival, but I mention it anyway to have a quick gloat at the expense of US folks who have not yet got this tense, visually daring, & serious-minded sci-fi thriller.  Seriously, the US gets ‘The Hitcher’ & ‘The Fog’ remakes a couple of months before the UK, we get ‘Hot Fuzz’ & ‘Sunshine’ months before the US.  It makes up a bit for ‘Grindhouse’.

Anyway, the festival started with a French short ‘Les Morveux’ from director Pierre-Louis Levacher.  A base, bloody, but funny riposte to the likes of ‘The Choir’, with its angelic singing small children.  It perhaps inevitably keeps most of the gore off-screen, but suggests it with gloriously exaggerated sound effects &huge squirts of blood – it probably wouldn’t be nearly as funny if you could see the violence exacted on the kids, & it’s perhaps let down by use of unconvincing CG in a couple of places.  The opening feature was US indie ‘Mulberry Street’.  A slow beginning sets up the characters living in a dank, seedy NYC apartment block, but then hell suddenly breaks out & the pace is relentless.  Rats have started attacking people in the city, infecting them with a mysterious virus that turns them into “big fucking rats” – fast, savage, & hungry for human flesh.  The sheer ambition & scope of the film are realistically beyond the financial & technical resources of the production, but happily they didn’t let that put them off & somehow manage to make it work by putting everything they’ve got up onscreen.  Where it perhaps falters is in its depiction of the infected & their attacks, which shows a very clear debt to ’28 Days Later’ in movements of the attackers, camerawork & editing.  This does make the film lose some of it’s impact, but it nonetheless remains effective & manages to build up a sense of genuine excitement as it builds towards it’s climax using the standard siege-movie dynamic typical of much low-budget horror.  It lacks the pretensions, scope, or haunting melancholy of ’28 Days’, but instead focuses on delivering late-night B-movie thrills.  If the basic ingredients are fairly familiar, the mix still works well & with decent performances it will doubtless win its share of fans.

As with every night of the fest, the Filmhouse bar is open until 3am, allowing for a couple of beers before heading off for some sleep.  The next day, films start at 1315 with the short ‘Hitch’, a funny little piece with a serial killer picking up a hitchhiker, which suddenly turns into a rom-com.  This was accompanying a rare theatrical showing for an episode of ‘Masters of Horror’, Tobe Hooper’s ‘The Damned Thing’.  Most people will have seen this already, & for me it was the weakest main title of the festival, which falters afters it’s great shotgun-toting opening.  After that it’s a standard MoH mix of bland generic scenes, clumsy crap (a CG oil-monster!), OTT gore, & some genuinely inspired sequences.  It would be better if the idea was treated with more budget & running time to show more of the madness spreading across town, but it’s enlivened by Ted Raimi’s turn as the local Priest.

Next up is the short film showcase ‘What You Make It’ at 1515, a collection of 3 shorts which are not really horror, but nonetheless so dark, disturbing or generally fucked-up that they deserve to be seen.  ‘Les Petits Hommes Vieux’ (aka Men from Older Space) was a funny-creepy French film that casts the visits of old people to an alien invasion.  Wonderfully inventive & hugely memorable, it was one of my fave shorts of the fest.  The first Spanish title at the fest was ‘Avatar’, a slow-burning bit of suspense with a quadriplegic man being bathed by his wife.  Their strained relationship reaches breaking point, & it’s not going to end nicely.  Whilst I was watching this one, despite it’s neat photography & great performances, I was slightly under whelmed, yet the conclusion was one that stayed with me.  More than any other short, this was one that I kept thing about again & again – surely the sign of something great.  The final film was ‘Y Que Cumplas Muchos Mas’ (aka Happy Birthday to You), another Spanish effort following a social worker who is attempting to help a boy who is suffering abuse.  With its startling turn into trendy torture horror & devious twists, this was another deliciously disturbing treat.

After a short break, ‘The Dead Tree Hotel’ is Lee F Sullivan’s French short following that old staple of a city couple lost on a back-road in the middle of nowhere.  Despite its fairly hoary setup the film is so moodily atmospheric, with flashes of almost ‘Calvaire’-esque surrealness & black humour, that it barely matters.  An oddly memorable piece well worth tracking down.  It was accompanying the second MoH episode to be screened, John Landis’ ‘Family’.  With its show-off opening shot, neat line in black humour, & great George Wendt performance, this is one of the better episodes of the series.

After a break to grab some food, 1915 brings the first of 2 of the ‘6 Films to Keep You Awake’ to show at the fest.  A bit like a Spanish version of MoH, this is a series of 6 horror/thriller films made for Spanish TV by popular directors.  Unlike MoH, which feels like a collection of episodes of a TV series, the Spanish efforts actually feel like proper films, albeit ones of the fairly low-budget variety.  Today’s film is ‘The Baby’s Room’, & director Alex de la Iglesia is here to introduce it.  He seems almost apologetic for the film he’s introducing, as it was made for no money in just 4 weeks, & he only kills 1 woman – “but she’s naked!” he adds brightly.  He does point out that he quite likes the film, but seems to think we won’t be so convinced.  He shouldn’t have worried, as this is a creepy & atmospheric film, which delivers some fascinating ideas & cracking shocks.  The film centres around a couple who move into a new house with their baby, but keep hearing strange noises over their baby monitor late at night.  Buying an infra-red camera & monitor, the man is shocked to wake one night & see a man standing over the baby in the next room – but I daren’t reveal any more about where the film goes from there.  Unusually for de la Iglesia it’s almost entirely devoid of humour (the setup sounds like the kind of thing Jaume Balaguero would have a field day with), & with brief echoes of ‘The Changeling’ & ‘Profondo Rosso’, this well-acted, stylish & unsettling film deserves to find an audience.  Although he at no point intended it to turn out that way, the director said he found it was like a film about his marriage, & the way he loves his kids but part of him just wants to kill them for ruining his life.  He also wonders if we hate him, because we have shit jobs & he gets to “make films, killing women.  Fucking bastard!”  Indeed, the Q&A session after the film will doubtless pass into DbD lore, as after answering one question (that low budget, we discover, was around 1Million Euros), he then starts asking us the questions, asking if we really believe that what’s happening now is actually real.  “This fucking shit moment here.  Why the hell am I in Scotland?” & posing that there must be other realities going on, as this one makes no sense.  Or something along those lines anyway – I was lost before I’d realised what was going on, & most of the audience was bemused in the extreme.  His films somehow seem to make slightly more sense after having listened to the guy talk.

After the film, there’s a brief break before the next film, so I have a walk around where I used to live when I was an Edinburgh resident, & mull over whether that bizarre Q&A was in fact real, or if I had just dreamt it all.  Sitting on a bench outside my old flat, munching on a pork pie, I can’t help wondering what I’d have thought 5 years ago if I’d walked past me sitting here now.  As I look behind me, a light switches on in my old flat, & I fully expect myself to come to the window & look out.  Alex de la Iglesia has completely undermined my sense of reality, which I’m sure is nowhere near that fragile.  Damn him!  Looking down, I wonder why the hell the minute hand on my watch is not going round.  For a moment I wonder if I had indeed slipped into a parallel reality, but I quickly realised my battery had gone, & then had to run half the way back to the cinema for the final film of the day.

At 2230, we get the puppet zombie western short film ‘It Came From The West’.  As weird & damned funny as it sounds, this Danish flick may play to baser sensibilities but that’s not necessarily a bad thing when you’re playing to a DbD audience.  The closing credits promise of a feature-length version, if only joking, is one to be looked forward to.  The final film of the day is ‘Flight of the Living Dead’, or ‘Plane Dead’ as it was called until about two weeks previously when New Line bought the rights.  It’s a bit tricky to talk about this one without thinking about that Snake film from last year, although since the idea for ‘Flight’ has been around longer it seems rather unfair that it’s going to be written off as a cash-in/spin-off.  Zombies are much more fun than snakes, although the basic structure of the film & several set-ups are so similar that this lower budget effort has a slight air of deja vu.  It’s a shame, as this is an energetic & fun shameless b-movie romp, with deliberately clichéd characters succumbing to bloody ends, & minimal worrying about the effects on the hull of considerable gunfire & the occasional enormous explosion.  Hardly a life-changing experience, it’s pacy, funny, inventive & gory – precisely the right kind of brainless late-night pulp that will be a solid earner when it hits DVD.

Saturday’s films start at 1230 with the beautifully icky & grungy ‘L’Instant Avant’ (The Moment Before).  Its strange use of a coat hanger is boldly memorable (even where you can see the effects join), & I can’t think about it without… ewwwww!!!!  Nice.   It was accompanying the Thai film ‘Shutter’, which had been courted by the fest for a couple of years now.  Time was when seemingly half the films at the festival would have been Asian efforts, but this is the sole entry this year, with nothing from Japan or Korea - & this one is a couple of years old.  Is the Asian horror well drying up?  I’d already got the DVD of this one, & had been pleasantly surprised by how decent it was, so was pleased to get the chance to see it on the big screen.  Whilst no classic, this is a perfectly solid effort & probably second only to ‘The Eye’ in the pantheon of Thai horror.  It does tend to overuse the old staple of soggy longhaired female ghost, & some of these scenes are rather clumsily or cheesily handled.  Still, it does have one sequence seemingly ripped off by the US ‘Grudge 2’ before it starts to wind its way around the back-story.  For the most part, it’s pretty average stuff, but the final 5 minutes add a bit of a twist, which somehow makes everything worthwhile, & the final shot is one to treasure.  When you look at some of the absolute crap that has been released in the UK under the banner of Asian horror in the last couple of years, quite why this little gem has thus far failed to get released is beyond me.  OK so it’s no classic, but fans of this kind of thing (whose numbers seem to be dwindling as more of the dregs of the genre are released) should find it a worthwhile addition to their collection.

The ‘Cutting Edge’ short film competition takes its usual Saturday afternoon slot – a selection of 12 shorts by new & upcoming filmmakers, the winner of which is voted for by the audience.  This year, the entrants were: Robert P. Olsson’s ’13:de Mars, 1941’, Adam Kargman’s ‘Anaesthesia’, Tony Kelly’s ‘Blind Man’s Alley’, B Jason Roer’s ‘Faceless’, Dan Gitsham’s ‘Film Eight’, Rodrigo Gudino’s ‘The Eyes of Edward James’, Paul Solet’s ‘Grace’, Faye Jackson’s ‘Lump’, Colin Decker’s ‘Mime Massacre’, James Sharpe’s ‘Nose Hair’, Alexander Brondsted & Antonio Tublen’s ‘The Amazing Death of Mrs Mueller’, & Ryan Levin’s ‘The Fifth’.  The standard of films was very high this year, & all have their individual merits.  For me, the standouts were: ‘Anaesthesia’, with its nervously queasy exploitation of surgical fear; the menacingly intense ‘The Eyes of Edward James’ with its POV camerawork; the rather therapeutic ‘Mime Massacre’; & the hysterical ‘The Fifth’, in which a group of friends have difficulty having a poker game since of the group’s occupation as a serial killer keeps getting in the way.  A real audience favourite thanks in no small part to the terrific comedic performance by Robert E Beckwith (‘Scrubs’), this turned out to be a deserving winner, although of course we don’t know that until the final film.  Crap, as suspense technique goes, that was hardly Hitchcock, was it?  Still, you can rest assured that even though you know it, no one else does yet.  Although clearly they do now, since I’m writing this after the fact.  Ah well, I guess that’s what you get for not being there, but having to make do with this second hand drivel instead.  Ha!

Meanwhile, back at the festival, at 1750 is the World Premiere of Mark Young’s ‘Southern Gothic’, introduced by the director.  This is a gorgeously shot & headily atmospheric vampiric tale, shot on Hi-Def.  The director said that a key inspiration for the film was unhinged preacher classic ‘Night of the Hunter’, which is a pretty lofty comparison to make - & whilst it’s inevitably not that good (relatively few films are), it’s an invocation that does not embarrass the film.  Genre fans will also find it’s brooding dusky mood reminiscent of the likes of ‘Near Dark’ & ‘Dust Devil’.  Indeed, it’s an interesting companion piece ‘Near Dark’, which is just as revisionist in its treatment of vampirism, selectively taking certain elements of the lore & not others, although the film looks south rather than west.  The film plays with the religious overtones of vampirism (the rising from the dead, the drinking of the blood) by having a sleazy preacher played by William Forsythe (who got cast after his agent misread the films’ budget!) turned into a vampire & seeing it as a sign from God.  Set in the preacher’s sights is a new stripper at the local strip club, & as he tries to save her, her only hope is the burnt-out alcoholic bouncer she has befriended.  With its measured pace & well-placed spots of gore, this slow-burning & literary-minded film won’t play well in a multiplex full of ADD-afflicted teens, but frankly that’s a good thing.  It’s a serious-minded & intelligently adult slice of horror that is all-too rare nowadays, & its mining of a rich vein of modern Gothicism & all-enveloping atmosphere deserves to find considerable attention amongst discerning horror fans.

There was a bit of a gap next, as the screen had been hijacked for a premiere as part of the ongoing French film festival, which did at least give a bit of a chance for folks to stock up on food for the night, or drink copious quantities of beer in the Filmhouse bar.  I was still in cinema mode, so after eating I decided to pop up to the nearby Cameo (a cinema I’m pretty fond of & get to visit all too rarely) for a screening of Shane Meadow’s follow-up to ‘Dead Mans Shoes’ – ‘This is England’.  It’s not part of the festival, so I shouldn’t really mention it here, but it’s a film typical of this director: naturalistic, brilliantly acted, & walking a fine line between comedy & drama, with the ability to twist into shocking violence at any time.

Back at the Filmhouse for midnight, because it’s time for the legendary DbD all-nighter!  First up, the Australian short film ‘Monster’ from director Jennifer Kent is a little cracker, a genuinely creepy & nervy piece with an unsettling tale of monsters in the closet.  This preceded one of the big hits of the festival, Maurice Devereaux’s ‘End of the Line’.  A group of people are trapped on a subway when a group of religious fanatics decide that they need to kill everyone in order to set their souls free for the coming apocalypse.  A step forward from Devereaux’s last film (cult fave ‘Slashers’), this is still discernibly the work of the same director, with it’s larger than life feel, slightly exaggerated performances, & extreme OTT splatter gore.  It is, however, considerably less rough around the edges, & a rather grungier tribute to great 80s slasher films that could almost be a lost classic, & yet which somehow also manages to feel fresh.  At its centre is a cracking premise that allows for relentless claustrophobic tension as a ragtag group of survivors flee for their lives along murky underground tunnels.  Devereaux turns out to be too intelligent to simply let those religious zealots become cartoon bogeymen, as he remembers that they are human too, with moments of doubt & weakness, & it all leads to a simply stunning ending.  A breathlessly action-packed treat, filled with black humour & crowd-pleasing gore, it’s something of an instant classic midnight movie, & one that will inevitably pick up a huge cult following as more horror fans get to see it.

There’s a little bit of a break after the film to catch our breath back & pop down to the bar for some final beers of the night, before the short film ‘Terror!’  Ben River’s brilliantly edited montage of scenes from great slasher flicks of the late 70s/early 80s – a delicious reminder of why we love these movies.  This preceded ‘Gruesome’, a feature from directors Joshua & Jeffrey Crook.  This is a coolly stylish film about a girl who is trapped in a personal hell by constantly reliving a day in which she is plagued by a mysterious stranger, & which constantly leads back to her brutal death at his hands.  Although its dislocated sense of reality, surreal touches & cyclic nature make it seemingly obvious it’s an “all in the mind”-type film, the final revelation is a really neat & well-thought out one, which puts the film way above the likes of ‘Soul Survivors’ or ‘Dead End’.  Plus, as the film progresses, it gradually gets more & more brutal, gaining an inexorable momentum & sense of unease as it deviously twists its way towards the denouement.  In other years, this would have been one of the best films of the fest, so it’s almost a bit of a shame that the line-up is so strong this year, as it prevented the film from making the kind of impact it might otherwise have done.

A regular feature of DbD is it’s programme of classics screenings, giving fans the rare chance to see old favourites on the big screen the way they were intended.  With so many great new films to cram in, there’s only space for one this year - & with the shitastic remake looming over UK cinemas imminently, what better time to revisit the original ‘The Hitcher’?  I’d actually only seen this film once before, in a P&S (& possibly cut) VHS version, & honestly it hadn’t really done that much for me.  But now, up on the big screen in full 2.35:1, it all started to make a kind of sense to me that it somehow hadn’t previously.  It’s still not on my list of favourites, but I was pleased to discover how much I’d underrated it previously.  Partway through the film, the smell of gently frying bacon fills the theatre, so when the film finishes at around half six, it’s clearly time to head down to the bar for bacon rolls & coffee. 

Just after 7am we reconvene upstairs for a screening of The Butcher Brothers’ ‘The Hamiltons’.  The cast have specially recorded a video introduction for us that is pretty funny, even if someone seems to have told them we’re in Glasgow, not Edinburgh.  Ah well.  The film itself has been picking up some good word of mouth & strong festival showings, & you can see why.  An odd beast, it falls somewhere between blackly comic drama & horror with its tale of four siblings who try to get along following the death of their parents.  Nothing particularly unusual about that you may think, but these four have tastes & needs that are…not societies norm.  Some people have compared the film to ‘The Texas Chain Saw Massacre’, but there’s one key difference - ‘The Hamiltons’ is told from the perspective of the family.  This threatens to turn the film into a suburban sitcom version of ‘House of 1000 Corpses’, a load of villain-worship wank with no interest in the victims, save for how much blood they contain.  Thankfully, the filmmakers are above that & its examination of the family dynamics makes for interesting viewing.  Even so, like ‘House…’ I found myself wondering through most of the film “Yeah, but why?  What’s the point?”  Well, the film does actually explain why, albeit it in a uniquely inventive & somewhat abstract kind of way.  It’s a climactic revelation that makes sense of the rest of the film, & had me revising my somewhat sceptical opinion rather upwards.  I can’t think of any other film around at the moment quite like this one, making it a pleasing different & unusual blackly comic treat & needing no further recommendation than that.

Well, the time is heading towards 9am, but there’s no rest yet, for the final film of the all-nighter is up next, Koldo Serra’s ‘The Backwoods’.  It’s an intriguing thing to note that the film with the biggest name cast of the festival is the one tucked away right at the back end of schedule.  Gary Oldman, Paddy Considine & Virginie Ledoyen head the cast in this compelling thriller set in the summer of 1978.  Considine & Ledoyen are a couple on the verge of splitting up who decide to spend the summer with Oldman & his wife his old family home deep in the woods of Northern Spain.  Out hunting one day, Oldman & Considine are startled to discover a deformed young girl chained up in a remote cabin, but their efforts to help her sets them against a group of local villagers.  Essentially this is a variant on the ‘Deliverance’/’Straw Dogs’ theme, with Considine in the Dustin Hoffman-type role as the passive cityboy forced to discover what strengths lie inside him. The real strength of the film is in its terrific performances – it’s sometimes easy to forget just how fine an actor Oldman is, but this is a great reminder.  His final scene is as wonderfully controlled a piece of work as I’ve seen him do.  Considine is rather more restrained in a role that will be something of a shock to those who only know him from ‘Dead Mans Shoes’, but no less effective in a less showy role.  If it ultimately adds little new to the genre, it is a very well put-together film, beautifully photographed & with a razor-sharp denouement that moves unexpected into Western territory. 

And so, at around half past 10, we are finally sent reeling out into the daylight.  Usually at this point I decide that if I try to sleep I’ll not wake up again, & so wind up staggering down Princes St & getting comically mistaken for a junkie by disapproving old men.  Sometimes I get people trying to buy some gear off me, who are then bemused or pissed off when I offer them some Pro-Plus.  But not this year, as I think I must be getting old & no matter how wide awake I feel, I decide to head back to my hostel for a quick couple of hours kip & trust my alarm clock will wake me.  When I close my eyes, all I can see is assorted bodyparts comically exploding from blasting shotguns, dancing up & down on the inside of my eyelids.  I awake to discover the hot brunette who was sleeping in the bunk opposite mine is sitting on the end of my bed.  I’m trying to comprehend the enigmatic smile on her face, when suddenly she lunges at me with a dagger she’d hidden inside a crucifix.  Understandably shocked by this turn of events, I barely mange to roll out of the way in time, sliding off the bed & scuttling backwards across the floor.  My eyes bounce around the room as I search for an escape from her bloody leer, and she licks her lips, highlighting the murderous fury in her eyes.  I feel something behind me, & realise it’s an open locker.  Groping around inside for anything I might be able to protect myself with, I happen upon an old Thomas the Tank Engine LP.  A soul-shattering shriek fills the room as she charges across the room towards me, & I fumble to slide the record out of its sleeve.  Turning to face my nemesis, I lunge back towards her holding out the record.  It slices into her throat with the force of her momentum, the black vinyl oozing with gushing blood pouring out of the wound which leers at more with more gaping fury than her disturbing smile.  I feel a twinge in my stomach as she stumbles backwards, her body writhing & twitching as showers of blood spurt from her neck & an unearthly yell shatters my eardrums.  Looking down, I see the dagger sticking out of my side.  Heaving it out, it reveals a gaping chasm in which slimy internal organs can be clearly seen writhing in goo.  “Hmm”, I think, “I wonder what that tastes like?” as I start to pull them out.  Next thing I know, my alarm is going off, & I’m somewhat glad to discover that I’ve managed to awake in time for the first screening on Sunday with no problems.  In fact, that short sleep really took the edge off the tiredness & made Sunday much easier than it had been in previous years.

First up on Sunday was a trio of short films, starting at 1515.  ‘The Love Craft’ is an amusing skit that was discovered online (you should be able to find it on YouTube); essentially Cthulhu meets cheesy daytime TV.  Check it out.  ‘Le Jour du Festin’ (The Day of the Feast) is a stylishly & hugely inventive French oddity, packed with absurdist black humour & with an unexpected conclusion that left a couple of people scratching their heads.  Finally the simply titled ‘Zombie Movie’ is a New Zealand quickie that overcomes budget limitations by being set almost entirely in one car, & is a pretty funny look at intense stupidity in the face of a zombie apocalypse.  It’s not quite up to Peter Jackson standards (he receives thanks in the credits), but still is well worth a watch if you get the chance.

At 1645, the lengthy short ‘The Frolic’ turns out to be a stylish look at a psychologist who is interviewing an unidentified psycho who preys on children, ‘freeing’ them from their bodies.  This kind of thing is perhaps over familiar, but it’s well put-together, well acted, & with an enigmatic final twist it manages to overcome this & become something genuinely interesting.  It preceded the final MoH episode, this time from season 1.  Did I say that ‘Shutter’ was the only Asian film here this weekend?  Well, Takashi Miike’s ‘Imprint’ is made with American money & shot rather awkwardly in English, so cut me a little slack, eh?  Sadly nixed from last years schedule, this deserved a screening even if it’s relatively tame by Miike’s standards (& it did make me wonder what the prolific Miike has been doing recently if this is his most recent effort worth screening).  Despite it’s awkward structure & bland Billy Drago performance, this is one of the few episode of MoH to be worthy of the name, & even if Miike’s deliberate busting of taboos seems a touch too calculated, it’s so much deranged fun it doesn’t really matter.

After a swift break for some much needed nourishment, 1915 brings about the short ‘Room 69’ about the new night watchman in a psychiatric hospital who is fully expecting his employers to play a trick on him on his first night when he discovers a sociopathic nymphomaniac being held in the titular Room 69.  Although you can see the ending coming, it’s still a fun ride to get there, & even if it doesn’t really make sense, who says films set in psychiatric hospitals should make sense?  This is a deliciously entertaining piece from directors Allan Mauduit & Jean-Patrick Benes.  ‘La Hora Fria’ (which translates as The Cold Hour, although the English title is given as The Dark Hour) starts our climactic Spanish triple-bill.  It’s not officially one of the ‘6 Films to Keep You Awake’, but with its low budget & tight use of minimal locations it fits quite nicely with them.  A sci-fi shocker, this follows a ‘Day of the Dead’-esque group of survivors as they try to get along in a dark underground bunker, & stay out of the way of the ‘strangers’, bloody zombie-like creatures who roam the corridors, infecting anyone they touch.  And even creepier are the ‘invisibles’ – strange, ghost-like entities who end the complex at night as the temperature drops way below zero.  Using its limited sets wisely, the film generates some genuine claustrophobic tension as conflicts in the group rise, & is impressive in the way it creates fear of outside invaders without having to explain exactly what the threat is.  With replaying of old nuclear safety public information films constantly on the TV it seems to be something suitably apocalyptic, but it remains ambiguous up until the sly ending which boasts a money shot that rivalled ‘Shutter’ for best final shot of the fest.  Many people will find the film to be rather too slow-moving, for whilst there are some bursts of running around in dark tunnels, firing guns at barely glimpsed beasties in the best sci-fi action traditions, these sequences are fairly short & well spaced out (if generically exciting).  Most of the film is concerned with the tensions of the group dynamic & the mysterious ever-present threat from outside.  It’s a cool & inventive slice of sci-fi on a budget which, whilst not quite this years ‘Cube’ should have no trouble finding a similar audience.

At 2200 it’s time for the now-annual ‘Shit Film Amnesty’, whereby anyone who can be arsed to gives in the worst DVD they’ve ever bought, & after a public vote the person with the worst film gets to win everyone else’s shit films, plus a couple of nice extra goodies.  The clear winner this year is somewhat pleasingly ‘The Wicker Man’ remake, although the person who handed it in made it quite clear that he didn’t want any prize at all if it meant having to get the film back.  The prize therefore goes to second-place film ‘Dumpster Baby’, which somewhat ironically was one of the films won in last years amnesty (when the winner was ‘Erotic Nights of the Living Dead’), so the same guy wound up winning shite two years in a row! 

Next, there’s a pair of shorts from French animator Nieto, ‘Far West’, & ‘Cartopolis’.  Both follow the same structure of an OHP lecture gone a bit lairy, & are good playful fun.  These preceded the second of the ‘6 Films To Keep You Awake’, Jaume Balaguero’s ‘To Let’.  Although Balaguero is not a well-known name amongst the mainstream movie-going public, he has deservingly built himself a reputation amongst horror fans as one of the most exciting new talents to emerge so far this century.  Whilst ‘To Let’ starts off as a seemingly typical Balaguero atmospheric piece of people trapped in a threatening otherworldly building, it suddenly twists & becomes something completely different.  It’s as if Balaguero just decided “fuck it!” he’d just put his hair down, let it all hang out & have a bit of old-fashioned fun.  The result is a gleefully gory & deranged old school slasher romp with a twist, & a film that will do more to help maintain his reputation than Calista Flockhart starrer ‘Fragile’ did.  It’s great to see ‘Dagon’s oddly bewitching mer-beauty Macarena Gomez take the lead role here & her Barbara Steele-esque looks are turned into a toughly compelling scream queen.  After a deceptively slow start where Balaguero shows he’s still the master at making us creepily unnerved by the slightest thing, with no warning the film suddenly kicks into frantic violent overdrive & from then on it’s a relentless thrill ride of Bait & Chase, bloody gore - & cat, mouse, & fuckoff hungry dogs.  A certain amount of willing suspension of disbelief is required to properly enjoy this one (at the end, someone sat near me was heard to loudly declare, “that fucking sucked!” on the basis of those “got to go back for the keys”-type moments), but frankly either you enjoy this type of thing or you don’t.  If you want to go through & pick holes, you’re welcome to – but personally I was busy having way too much fun to care.  Balaguero is a master at staging horror scenes, & the great thing about ‘To Let’, with its pounding, Theremin-induced score, is that if you simply put yourself in his hands, he’ll show you a damned good time.

And so we’re on to the final film of the year, at midnight.  Before that there’s just time to announce the winner of the ‘Cutting Edge’ short film competition – the very popular ‘The Fifth’ takes it (oh go on, at least try to act surprised) - & to hand out assorted swag.  Perhaps not quite as many goodies this year as there has been in the past, but everyone got a copy of the excellent ‘Motion Picture Purgatory’ book courtesy of the nice folks at FAB Press, who were around all weekend selling a variety of books, DVDs & T-Shirts.  The final film of the festival is the Russia-set (but English language) Spanish film ‘The Abandoned’, the feature debut of acclaimed short-filmmaker Nacho Cerda.  Boasting a heavyweight writing trio of Cerda, Karim Hussain & Richard Stanley, this damned creepy & elegantly shot film let the festival go out on a high.  Whilst it’s perhaps tricky to empathise with the characters plight, thus stopping it from being truly terrifying, as a thickly atmospheric bedtime ghost story this is one to treasure.  The film is sumptuously shot by DoP Xavi Giminezs (‘The Machinist’) in a gorgeously all-enveloping world of dark greens & browns which adds considerably to the otherworldly feel of the film, creating a menacing world where anything could be lurking in the dark, decaying corners of the room.  With several highly successful creep-out sequences & a well-drawn cyclic narrative line that ties up with almost poetic inevitability, it’s a highly impressive debut that really ought to have garnered more attention on its US release back in February.

And there we are, down to the bar before it closes at 3am, & the festival is over for another year.  This year, I have discovered (amongst other things) that sleeping helps to keep you awake, Spain is vying to be the new capital of horror, Alex de la Iglesia is off in his own alternate reality, Neil Marshall popped in for a quick pint but didn’t have anything to show from ‘Doomsday’, & if you’re wondering what to do with all those spare coat hangers in your wardrobe, you really shouldn’t call Alvaro Zendejas.  It’s been the best selection of movies for a couple of years, & after the difficulties in trying to pick a best anything from 2006 for our years end list, there is hope here.  Cracking new movies are starting to come through if you know where to look, & hopefully it won’t be too much longer before you’ll be able to see these films too.

Thanks to: Adele Hartley, James McKenzie & all who helped to organize & run Dead by Dawn; all the guests, including Alex de la Iglesia, Mark Young, & all those who didn’t introduce their films but still turned up, & everyone who was involved in allowing films to be screened, also to the cast of The Hamilton’s for their special intro, & to all the rest of the festival-goers whose enthusiastic reactions make the experience something special; not to forget those hard-working Filmhouse staff who put up with working some frankly ridiculous shifts to enable the festival to take place.  Your hard work & generosity is appreciated.