Zombie All Nighter – 3rd October 2015

In lead up to our regular festival over Halloween weekend, Waves of Horror is hosting an all night screening of zombie films at the Gulbenkian cinema in Canterbury.

It begins at 8pm on Saturday October 3rd (with an estimated 6am finishing time).

Details of the films below:

Night of the Living Dead (George Romero, 1968)

A motley group of people bicker and argue as the freshly returned dead lay siege to a remote farmhouse. Romero’s black and white, low budget horror film changed the zombie genre from its origins in voodoo and superstition into something more relevant and terrifying. He depicts them as flesh eating creatures which inspired the development of the genre into what it is today.

Return of the Living Dead (Dan O’Bannen, 1985)

When a deadly military poison is accidentally released into the atmosphere, it brings every piece of dead tissue it comes into contact with back to life. This horror comedy begins with the premise that the events of Night of the Living Dead actually happened, and developed into a separate franchise with four additional sequels.

The Evil Dead (Sam Raimi, 1981)

Five teenagers go to a cabin deep in the woods and accidentally let loose a succession of demons. This low budget independent film, banned in the UK for a period as part of the backlash against ‘video nasties’, began the careers of director Sam Raimi (Spiderman) and horror star Bruce Campbell.

Pontypool (Bruce McDonald, 2008)

This Canadian production takes place almost entirely in a radio studio, as a DJ receives updates about a series of ‘civil disturbances’ happening outside. This is an alternative take on the zombie movie, one which is rarely seen, but which has made many ‘best horror film’ lists in recent times.

Dawn of the Dead (Zack Snyder, 2004)

This effective remake of George Romero’s 1978 original is director Snyder’s (300, Man of Steel) first film. It sees a team of survivors of the apocalypse take shelter in a shopping mall, walled off from the zombie horde outside.

Shaun of the Dead (Edgar Wright, 2004)

The first cinematic collaboration between Wright and star Simon Pegg (after TVs Spaced), Shaun of the Dead is a hugely successful and inventive parody of the genre, as well as an effective and gory zombie movie in its own right.

In My Skin Introduction

Below is the introduction by Katerina for our screening of In My Skin at the Gulbenkian cinema in Canterbury on Wednesday 25th March.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Welcome everyone to the last screening in The Waves of Horror French Extreme film season. Tonight’s film In My Skin (Dans Ma Peau, 2003) is written and directed by, and stars Marina da Van. It’s an appropriate choice to close the season, for not only does it embody many of the themes and concerns of the New French Extreme such as, the obvious focus on and obsession with the body, centralising the female, gender identity, and transgression and taboo breaking in the construction of the screen image of the body; but In My Skin also employs a surrealist aesthetic at times to enhance the horror, as has Amer and The Strange Colour of your Body’s Tears shown previously in the season.

At the heart of the film is Esther, played by da Van, an assured and determined professional, sociable and in a stable and fulfilling relationship. One night at a party she hurts her leg, but it isn’t until much later in the evening that Esther notices blood and the extent of her injuries. When she finally visits a doctor, the doctor surprised at how little pain she feels, jokingly asks her, “Are you sure it’s your leg?” And so begins Esther’s fascination with her body. The film examines the body explicitly and externally and functions as a snapshot of human anxieties regarding our bodies both corporeally and socially.
Da Van herself graduated from the Sorbonne University with a degree in Philosophy and went on to study at the French School for Cinematic Studies. It was here that she met Francois Ozon, with whom she has collaborated with on many projects, as both a writer and actress. Together the two wrote, Under the Sand and 8 Women and da Van also appeared in Ozon’s ominous short film, See the Sea.
In an interview with The Guardian, da Van discussed how her own experiences as a child and her obsession with her body were areas she wished to explore in the form of film. When she was eight, da Van was knocked down by a car, leaving her with a broken leg. She explained that she reacted to the trauma by conceptualising her broken leg as something outside of her body. Seeing x-rays of her fracture, da Van began viewing her leg, in her own words, as a “fascinating deformed object”, and would jab needles into the desensitised scar tissues on her leg as a school prank. Expanding further, da Van admitted that the accident instigated a process of estrangement from her leg that developed into a certain fascination or obsession with her body during adolescence. Describing herself as a Cartesian adolescent, she began contemplating her body as an object, as something outside her identity.
Rebelling against the notion that all dysfunctional behaviour requires explaining da Van insists the film isn’t intended to be viewed as a sociological study of self-harm, but rather an existential exploration of one woman’s incomprehensible relationship with her body. This has led to claims that the failure of the film is in its refusal to explore the roots of Esther’s behaviour and the accusation by The Chicago Tribune‘s critic Robert K Elder that da Van is nothing more than a blood pornographer. Elder’s position is this, and I quote, “Imagine someone making a film about bulimia but only showing its characters as they purge – and eroticising that activity – without any explanation of its cause.”
Stuart Jeffries of The Guardian is more confrontational. Pronouncing da Van as the output of the genetic splicing of PJ Harvey and Audrey Heburn, Jeffries says this, and again I quote, that da van is a “self-absorbed woman who’s made a sickening film, teeming with self-regard masquerading as existential self-exploration.” da Van rebuffed these criticisms by claiming such critics to be entrenched in bourgeois conventions, while she is the one who is liberated and daring enough to represent self-mutilation as an autoerotic action.
Finishing, I would like to say a word about the reception of the film and others in New French extreme cycle. There have been reports of walk outs and vomiting at the premieres at Cannes of Irreversible and Martyrs, but I’ve always considered these to be urban myths. Even though I have witnessed walk outs in screenings of Irreversible. I consider In My Skin to be the least gory and least unsettling of films in the cycle. So I was really surprised to read that The Guardian’s film critic, Peter Bradshaw could only watch some scenes through his fingers and that when the film premiered at the Edinburgh film festival, it had (and I quote), “people staggering for the aisles…hands clamped over mouths, cheeks ballooning”. I also have it on good authority that audience members of a screening at a film festival in Turkey fainted whilst watching the film. So to all of you who I told that this film isn’t too bad in the gore stakes….maybe I was wrong?!

Amer Introduction

Below is the introduction by Katerina for our screening of Amer at the Gulbenkian cinema in Canterbury on Tuesday 10th March.

Welcome to tonight’s screening of Amer which is part of the Waves of Horror’s French Extreme film season.

Amer is the feature length debut from Helene Cattet and Bruno Forzani, following on from their two award-winning short films, La fin de notre amour (2002) and Santos Palace (2006). The film itself is essentially a three part psychodrama, each unfolding around a formative episode in the life of Ana, the main character of the film. Indeed the episodes follow the life of Ana’s sexuality from her sexual awakening as a child, to her burgeoning sexuality as adolescent, stirring to her power to allure; to finally, her adult sexually repressed self.

Rather than feeling episodic, the narrative weaves a mosaic path, hinting and suggesting at reality and fantasy, but never truly affirming either state; rather the film remains ambiguous and enigmatic throughout, leaving the spectator unsure and a little puzzled, as to what they are witnessing.

As a horror film, Amer pulls upon and taps into, the stuff of all good horror films, that is voyeurism, sex, desire, punishment and death! Indeed, the film is a Freudian wet dream and is accused by some as being nothing more than “a protracted erotic tease that evokes primal connections between sex and violence, masculine and feminine”. Not just a wet dream for Freud, the film is also criticised for being too “art-house” for the everyday horror spectator to penetrate and therefore only of use as a wet dream for critics and film academics alike!

Virtually dialogue-less, the film cinematically animates the horror and sexual fantasy through colour, sound, editing, the tools at cinema’s disposal. As with The Strange Colour of your Body’s Tears, the film plays as a murder mystery, luring the audience down the rabbit hole into a narrative that delights in serving up echoes of things past that the audience search through in the hope of making sense of the visual and aural signifiers.

With its visual and musical stylings, thematic preoccupations with sex, women and death, Amer is a surrealist homage to Italian genre cinema. The largest nod though is to giallo cinema as shown through the use of gloved killers and the film’s colour codings. And again, as had The Strange Colour of your Body’s Tears, Amer directly lifts music from a previous giallo film. Here it is, What Have They Done to your Daughters? (1974), a murder mystery in which those suspected as being part of a teenage prostitution ring are murdered by a mysterious stranger clad in motorbike leathers.

The end result being, Amer is a film of uneasy mood with an ambiguous and elliptical narrative, and that for all its engagement with Italian cinema, is an original slice of horror cinema that stands out from the generic fodder that so dominates the contemporary market, but is quickly forgotten. Amer, on the other hand, remains in the mind’s eye.

Martyrs Introduction March 5th 2015

Below is the introduction, delivered by Katerina Flint Nicol, for our screening of Martyrs at the Gulbenkian cinema in Canterbury on March 5th 2015.

Good evening and welcome to the second screening in our French Extreme season. Tonight is Martyrs, which is one of the popular and more enjoyable films – if you can describe extreme horror as enjoyable – of this cycle. And in many ways, Martyrs is a film that effortlessly synthesises the intellectual pursuit of the philosophy of suffering with extreme body horror to make a horror film  only the French could make! And for those who haven’t seen it, I’ll try to avoid plot spoilers!

Having said that though and taking into account that Martyrs is considered  part of the French Extreme cycle and indeed French cinema itself, the film is a co production between Quebec and France and was filmed in Montreal in 2007. Written and directed by Pascal Laugier, who had previously directed the misunderstood House of Voices in 2004, Martyrs is known for its total nihilism and is often criticised for being a horror film without fun, for being a film that explicitly denies the audience any level of enjoyment in the suffering witnessed on screen.  Laugier himself provides a partial explanation for this. Experiencing a very melancholic period due to the adverse reaction House of Voices received, Laugier began writing the script for Martyrs. Although transforming his own personal struggle into the narrative, Laugier admits to explicitly  transposing his desperation and depressive state into the film. In an interview with Fangoria, Laugier states the following, QUOTE ” [I used} the horror genre as a kind of direct expression, maybe as a means of saving myself…I wrote Martyrs with a feeling of desperation. That’s why I always saw the film as a dark melodrama, a love story that turns horribly wrong”. And indeed it is, as the audience watches the plot twist and turn initially around the main characters of Anna and Lucie, the film plays as if a monstrous female melodrama – an horrific Gothic fantasy for the 21st century.

The filming itself has gained a reputation for being an ardrous process. Apart from the language and culture clashes between the co Canadian and French team, the shoot was uncomfortable for the actors too. In order to garner the extreme emotional explicitness required from Morjana Alaoui in the scenes where her character, Anna, is beaten and kicked on a daily basis, Laugier endeavoured to keep a distance between her and the crew.  Though this resulted in the required uncomfortable and isolated emotional state for Alaoui to play Anna effectively, it also created daily tensions between the director and the crew. To the point where it was rumoured some of the crew considered Laugier’s approach too radical and indeed immoral. Towards the end of the shoot, Alaoui fell through a fake ceiling and broke her arm, adding to the already tense atmosphere, delaying the shoot and jeopardising the production. While, Mylene Jampanoi who played Lucie also often endured 12hr periods of crying, for days at a time in order for her scenes to work effectively. The film though is overshadowed by the suicide of the film’s Special Effects expert, Benoit Lestang, who took his own life, for unknown reasons, before being able to see the final version on screen. Working to a tight budget, Lestang created stunning visceral and bloody effects which not only intensified the  nihilistic emotional tone of the film, but also serves to enhance the overall look, uplifting the production values which results in an art house feel for the film.

The narrative and imagery of the film has led critics to align Martyrs with the “torture porn” cycle, but Pascal Laugier has always maintained, rightly so, that the film is about human suffering and pain, not about torture and is quoted as saying, “The film is only really about the nature and the meaning of human suffering. I mean, the pain we all feel on an everyday basis – in a symbolic way.” Laugier though remains ambivalent towards the relationship between the film and the “torture porn cycle”, depending on the benefits the relationship brings to the reception and success of the film.

But as with the other films classed as New French Extremity, Martrys focuses on the body and as the  blogger Matt Smith concludes,  here in Martyrs, “The body is meant to be examined, explicitly and eternally, to deepen our understanding of our own humanity..and what we hope lies in wait for us at the end of it all.” Much of the film concerns itself with knowledge, the knowledge of eternity, to know, possess  and control what happens after death, to be assured that the suffering we experience in life has reason and brings rewards for enduring it. It is the eternal and universal desire of humanity, as with Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, to be on equal terms with God, to find the divine in eternity. In this sense, Martyrs is very akin to that most un-horrific Hollywood film,  Raiders of the Lost Ark, as bizarre as that sounds! As with the archaeologist Belloq and the Nazi’s in Raiders who wanted to possess and control the power of the Ark and commune with God, so does  Mademoiselle and the cult in Martyrs, strive to know and possess the divine, to know and control their eternal destiny. The final scenes  echo Indiana Jone’s challenge to Belloq, “You want to talk to God? Let’s go see him together”.

Anyway, let’s hope none of us meet God tonight, but I hope you in some perverse way, enjoy the film.

Thank you.  

Introduction to The Strange Colour of Your Body’s Tears

Below is a transcript of the introduction given by Katerina Flint Nicol to The Strange Colour of Your Body’s Tears that kicked off our French Extreme season at the Gulbenkian cinema in Canterbury on 23rd February, 2015.

Good Evening and welcome to the first screening of the Waves of Horror season of French Extreme films. Before I talk about the film we will be watching tonight, The Strange Colour of Your Body’s Tears, I just thought I’d spend some time talking of what is French Extreme Horror. For as we shall see with the other films in the season, that although there is a presumption that the word, Extreme, pertains to gore, blood fest, sex, violence and indeed excessive representations; the word Extreme also refers to the films’ capabilities to push what we consider to be horror to its limits. Our opening film tonight and the film that closes our season, In my Skin, both employ surrealism in aesthetics and narrative in order to subject the audience to the utmost horrifying cinematic experience and to incarcerate the characters in their own nightmares. But all the films that sit under the umbrella of French Extremity, know no limits and adhere to no boundaries and strive to push the frontiers of taste and of what unnerves, scares, repulses, and excites.

So, the term New French Extremity, or New French Extremism, is attributed to the Artforum critic, James Quandt, who coined it in order to band together films that begun to appear at the beginning of the century. Films such as Base-moi (2000), Haute Tension (2003), Frontieres and Inside, as well as growing bodies of work from directors such as Gaspar Noe and Catherine Breillat.  Quandt saw in such films similar transgressive and excessive qualities that traverse art-house sensibilities and exploitation cinema alike, while encompassing horror sub-genres such as slashers, home invasion, revenge films and body horror. Centralising the body, particularly that of the female and generally focusing on gender politics, Quandt describes New French Extremism as, ‘determined to break every taboo, to wade in rivers of viscera and spumes of sperm, to fill each frame with flesh, nubile or gnarled, and subject it to all manner of penetration, mutilation and defilement’.  Even descriptions have to be extreme and excessive! As the film blogger, Matt Smith writes, the films are a ‘comprehensive snapshot of human anxieties about our bodies, both corporeally and socially’.

Several of the films have generated some controversy in their premieres. Most notably, Gasper Noe’s Irreversible and Pascal Laugier’s Martyrs both premiered at Cannes, where it was reported audiences fainted, vomited, or walked out. I’m not hoping for those responses when Martyrs screens here next month. While some critics have noted the ability of the films for progressive political commentary, portraying contemporary society as isolating, horrific and threatening; others have accused the films of fascism and homophobia.

So, to The Strange Colour of your Body’s Tears. Where to start with such a film? Well, if David Lynch took acid and made a film, this is what it would look like! So, it isn’t surprising that both Bruno Forzani and Helene Cattet have repeatedly stated how their work is influenced by Lynch, having avidly watched Lynch films throughout their teenage years.  Indeed, although this is a highly creative and original piece of film making, the film owes much of its aesthetic and cinematic qualities to giallo films, especially Dario Argento’s Deep Red. The title of the film itself references such giallo films as The Strange Vice of Mrs Wardh, What are Those Strange Drops of Blood on Jennifer’s Body and All the Colours of the Dark.

The Strange Colour you Body’s Tears was ten years in the making, a period which saw the husband and wife director team of Bruno Forzani and Helene Cattet, film and release the critically acclaimed, and equally surreal, Amer.  Although influenced by giallo cinema, the film is no homage, but rather a re-interpretation, or maybe re-imagining of Giallo language as it pulls upon giallo iconography to tell its story. Certain scenes explicitly reference those from The Strange Vice of Wardh, whilst music extracted from giallo films not only appear, but are an intrinsic part of the construction of the film, appearing in and inspiring original drafts of the script. Indeed, the music functions to provide the feeling of “another time” to the film, as well as directing the pace and rhythm. 

The plot is simple, a man searching for his missing wife, very much in the vein of a whodunit or detective story. Much of the narrative occurs in the opening and closing scenes, as the film itself is not concerned with adhering to a rigid or cohesive narrative. Rather, the film concerns itself with pain and pleasure, sex and death to deliver a cinematic experience to the audience, akin to a ‘filmic orgasm’! The story is told through what is experienced through sound and images and hence becomes a sensual and physical experience through which the audience are confronted with their impulses, such as violence and desire. For as Forzani says, ‘a film is not a motorway, it’s about getting a bit lost among primitive things’.

First screening of 2015 – 23rd Feb

On Monday 23rd February at 9pm we host our first screening of 2015 as part of a series of (predominantly) French horror films.

The first film is The Strange Colour of Your Body’s Tears (Helene Cattet, Bruno Forzani, 2014) and it takes place at the Gulbenkian cinema in Canterbury on the grounds of the University of Kent. The film will be preceded by a short introduction by Katerina Flint Nicol, one of our organisers.