Films from FrightFest 2019 #4 - Reviews of The Furies (Australia 2019), Haunt (USA 2019), Witches in the Woods (Canada 2019), Daniel Isn't Real (USA 2019), Ready or Not (USA 2019) and Master of Dark Shadows (USA 2018)

The Furies (Australia 2019: Dir Tony D'Aquino) Maddie and Kayla are friends going through a tough time. Maddie wants Kayla, who she feels is hiding behind her epilepsy diagnosis, to take more risks in life. They quarrel and Maddie storms off, only to be abducted by a masked man. Later Kayla, whose epileptic episodes seem to be triggered by threat, wakes up in a box with the words 'Beauty 6' written on its side, in the middle of a forest. She meets two other women, Alice and Sheena, who are being pursued by masked men that look like they've stepped out of a 1980s stalk 'n' slash movie. And so begins Kayla's fight for survival and to locate her friend Maddie, a fight that eventually leads her to an abandoned old mining town and a realisation about what's happening to her.

This fairly standard setup, a sort of cross between The Hunger Games and The Most Dangerous Game, is rather overwrought without any real purpose, and the final reveal will have been guessed by most. Despite the rather 'meta' subtext to the movie, this is basically 80 minutes of scared women being menaced by large masked blokes, with some Hatchet style over the top gore added to keep the audience awake. And in 2019 I thought we'd got past this kind of setup. The cast are all totally unmemorable (even the ones without masks) and if one of the key themes of the film is to show a woman casting off her vulnerability and acquiring courage and determination, it's not enough.

Haunt (USA 2019: Dir Scott Beck, Bryan Woods) Hallowe'en funhouse and escape room films seem to be big business at the moment, and this movie has both, but let's not get ahead of ourselves.

Harper (Katie Stevens) is gradually facing up to the prospect of leaving her physically abusive boyfriend, and is persuaded by her plucky friend Bailey (Laura Lisa McClian) and their mates to get out and party. Said evening out ends up at an 'extreme' Hallowe'en haunted house with all the usual trap doors and out of work actors dressed up as your favourite fright flick villains (and a seemingly endless layout, which of course is necessary to lengthen the threat and thrills). But the 'extreme' element of the 'haunt' lives up to its name when the party can't tell whether those suffering at the hands of the marauding monsters are faking it or not. Of course they're not, and so Harper and her friends must try and find the exit, before others hasten their own.

Beck and Woods wrote A Quiet Place, which puts them way above the Z list credentials wise, and love him or hate him Eli Roth has a production credit: but the pair's last joint directorial effort was the rather ho hum Nightlight, so I wasn't expecting much. Haunt certainly isn't pushing any envelopes content wise, but it's an efficient chase piece. The people behind the 'Haunt' strongly suggest that there might have been more back story that didn't make it to the final cut, and the same can be said for the tortures which prey on the friends' phobias - spiders, closed spaces etc - which remain undeveloped. This is old school stuff for certain, but the escape room which Harper comes across within the house suggests an affectionate nod to that genre as well as an opportunity to understand her childhood exposure to domestic abuse, and the directors know how to mount a feint. Reasonable but no awards winner, Haunt passes the time, but no more.

Witches in the Woods (Canada 2019: Dir Jordan Barker) Seven students drive out into the woods headed for a ski resort and a weekend of beer and hot tub action. Among their number is sensible Jill (Hannah Kasulka) whose boyfriend, the irascible Derek (Craig Arnold), has encouraged her to tag along and ditch her schoolwork. Also along for the ride is grouchy Alison who doesn't seem to want to be there at all. Taking an ill advised short cut following a highway blockage, the group crash the car, just as snowfall begins to lower the temperatures and daylight fades. As if that's not enough, they're right next to the Stoughton Valley Witch Trial historical site.

Realising that they have literally nowhere to go, the occupants of the car start to eat away at each other (not literally, it's not that kind of film). It transpires that Alison's state is due to her being stuck with a group of guys that she has accused of being indirectly involved in an assault against her. Equally awkward is the fact that Jill is keen to break up with soccer jock Derek and formally get together with Derek's black teammate Philip (Corbin Bleu), also in the car. So when Alison goes off in search of help with one of the other guys, but returns alone, bloody and moaning, things go from bad to worse.

This movie's original title was 'Stranded' which plays to those elements in it that reminded me of the sub genre of 'abandoned' movies all the rage a few years ago, like Open Water and Frozen (no, not that one). The retitling shifts the emphasis to the quasi supernatural subtext which in all fairness is a bit of a con. It's left to the audience to decide whether what's happening to Alison is other worldly or just the actions of a deeply traumatised soul. The movie does however make the comparison between the Stoughton Valley witch trials and the microcosm of allegation and hysteria which ramps up within the crashed vehicle. But while the wintry scenery (shot in Ontario) looks genuinely isolating, there are too many genre cliches at work here (feet in bear traps, accidental injury by ski pole etc) to lift it from the run of the mill, and the post teens stuck in a car riff runs out of steam fairly quickly. 

Daniel Isn't Real (USA 2019: Dir Adam Egypt Mortimer) I described this to a fellow viewer at the FrightFest screening as a cross between Harvey (1950) and Drop Dead Fred (1991) but with the six foot rabbit and Phoebe Cates' imaginary friend replaced by a suave and unpredictable Patrick Bateman-alike from Brett Easton Ellis's 'American Psycho'. No wonder that viewer found his excuses to leave.

Anyhow, Daniel Isn't Real is a whole lot better than that rather awkward explanation above. Co-scripted by Brian deLeeuw, from whose book 'In This Way I Was Saved' the story was taken, DIR is, to put it mildly, quite the ride.

In an opening scene whose realism feels straight out of the news, young Luke witnesses a mass killing in a cafe, after which another little boy, Daniel, appears and whisks Luke off to play in the park. The arrival of Luke's mother reveals to us, as the film's title suggests, that Daniel is imaginary. His mother, who is none too well mentally herself, allows Luke to bring 'Daniel' home and the pair - one real, the other unreal - grow up together, with Daniel gradually pushing Luke to be more and more mischievous.

A grown up Luke attends college and seems to have grown out of having Daniel around, but all is not well with him and when his therapist suggests that Luke should embrace, rather than distance himself from his one time imaginary playmate, suddenly Daniel's back on the scene, calling the shots once more: shots which include sectioning Luke's mother and giving him tips on what to say to bed girls, a little like a psychotic Cyrano de Bergerac. Of course this can only have an ugly outcome.

DIR's greatness lies in its sheer woozy execution. Of course this is little more than a retelling of the classic 'Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde' story, but Patrick Schwarzenegger as grown up Daniel and adult Luke, Mike Robbins, make a bizarre but very watchable pair. As a movie it probably feels more dangerous than it actually is, but DIR looks great and is fully of trippy imagery, often at surprising moments. A great film, well worth both an initial and repeat viewing.

Ready or Not (USA 2019: Dir Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett) The last feature from this directing pair, 2014's underwhelming Devil's Due, promised little after their entertaining segments in 'portmanteau' movies V/H/S (2011) and Southbound (2015). But Bettinelli-Olpin and Gillett's latest is an arch and sumptuously mounted horror comedy which is, at its roots, an amusing update of Irving Pichel and Ernest B. Schoedsack's classic chase thriller The Most Dangerous Game (1932).

With those twin topics of class and the abuse of wealth and privilege never far from the surface, Ready or Not has plucky orphan Grace (Samara Weaving) marrying up into the wealthy Le Domas family, who have made their money through the manufacture of board games. After the wedding ceremony and festivities, which take place at the family's sprawling gothic home - straight out of the Addams family - Grace's new husband Alex (Mark O'Brien) informs his wife of a midnight tradition bestowed on all new members of the Le Domas clan: the playing of a game chosen at random from a puzzle box, whose origins are interlinked with the rise of the dynasty's prosperity. When Grace is dealt a card from the box marked 'Hide and Seek,' what first appears an innocuous request becomes a deadly fight for survival.

The potential thinness of premise of the movie is overcome by some great casting, a smart script and tightly directed action that brilliantly utilises the quirky layout of the mansion and grounds. The members of the eccentric Le Domas family are all superbly realised, although special praise should be given to the matriarchal side, namely Nicky Guadagni as the icy and formidable Aunt Helene, Andi MacDowell as haughty Becky, a brilliant psycho southern belle role which utilises the actor's South Carolina drawl to great comic effect, and Elyse Levesque as the brittle Charity, a survivor of the 'most dangerous game' whose most important goal is to hold on to the status of the family she married into. But the real star of the show is Samara Weaving (Hugo Weaving's daughter) as Grace, who manages the transformation from winsome bride to bloodied but unbowed fight-for-your-life action heroine all while wearing the same white wedding dress. What makes Ready or Not so successful is the script, which amidst all the comic horror mayhem never fails to shine a light on the satirical elements of the setup, gradually revealing the Le Domas family as grasping and insecure, while at the same time transferring all the power to our heroine.

If the final reel follows current trends in horror movies a little formulaically (and if you've watched Hereditary and indeed Satanic Panic you'll know what I mean) it can be forgiven, for the ride getting there is tremendous fun, and let's face it any movie which exposes the frailty and pettiness of the rich is fine by me.

Master of Dark Shadows (USA 2019: Dir David Gregory) As the title suggests, this documentary about the producer, writer, director and all round horror visionary Dan Curtis spends most of its running time devoted to arguably his most important output, the groundbreaking TV series Dark Shadows, which served up a steady diet of vampires, time travel, witches and werewolves to US daytime viewers every weekday between 1966 and 1971.

UK horror fans d'un certain âge will recall the tantalising drip feed of Dark Shadows gum cards, tie in books and comics in the late 1960s, without ever once seeing the show (a recent story had it that a single reel of the show was optioned to the BBC back in the day but they passed on the offer), so for us the first exposure to DS was the relatively recent release of the whole series via DVD box sets - and I should know, I've sat through 'em.

Most of the material garnered for this doc sadly comes from the plentiful extras in those sets, fleshed out with interviews filmed at a DS reunion several years ago. So the content is largely restricted to available information, which makes Master of Dark Shadows a trifle thin even for the novice, and more than a little dull for those with some knowledge of the show. Gregory includes all the usual touchpoints: the cheapness of the production and wobbliness of the sets; the lack of rehearsals; the inability of some of the cast to cope with live performances comfortably (again, older viewers will be able to appreciate much the same feeling from watching the soap Crossroads, although that show had fewer vampires). And of course looming over the whole thing was the toothsome, gruff visage of Curtis himself, admired by some, feared by many, a creative who took a chance to enliven a ratings nose diving soap with the injection of horror lite elements.

At about the hour point it's quite clear that there's going to be little room for his other TV and film projects, although the two spinoff DS movies, House of Dark Shadows and Night of Dark Shadows get some exposure, as does his 1975 Karen Black portmanteau movie Trilogy of Terror and his Herman Wouk adaptations The Winds of War (1983) and War and Remembrance (1988-89).

Master of Dark Shadows comes as a major disappointment after Gregory's hugely entertaining 2015 doc Lost Soul: The Doomed Journey of Richard Stanley’s Island of Dr. Moreau, although I confess I didn't catch his other 2019 doc, Blood & Flesh: The Reel Life & Ghastly Death of Al Adamson, which I understand was much better than this. But one can't take away the importance of DS. Without it there would be no Count Yorga: Vampire, no Blacula, and arguably no Buffy: the Vampire Slayer either (a series devised by Joss Whedon who had consumed DS on TV when he was a child).

VHS Forever? Once Upon a Time in Camden (UK 2019: Dir Mark Williams)

I'm not the first person to make a connection between the punk/post punk scene of the late 70s and the collection of (and fan writing about) VHS horror/exploitation titles of the early 1980s. Both were underground, niche, largely male, and supported/promoted by an explosion of fanzines written by enthusiasts, mainly for other enthusiasts.

VHS Forever: Once Upon a Time in Camden looks back to a time in the mid 1980s, when the Video Recordings Act of 1984 had started to bite and 'pre cert' videos, previously to be rented from small shops/newsagents across London, had largely disappeared (although I managed to pick up a pre cert copy of The Deadly Spawn in a north London shop as late as 1992).

The 'Psychotronic Video Store' in the basement of a Camden backstreet was one of a handful of places in London where, with the right word in the right ear, you could access the shop's famous back room, full of genre delights otherwise not available to fans (apart from the small ads carried in the back pages of the more established fanzines). 

Founded by Bal Croce, despite its subterranean access and rather off putting location, 'Psychotronic' (its name naughtily pilfered from Michael Weldon's infamous magazines/book) was on the surface a horror/sci fi/fantasy shop which specialised in selling BBFC certificated video tapes, books and magazines. But rather like the speakeasys of the 1920s, the reasonably innocent exterior masked a world of wonders behind the counter, via a list of imported and previously banned movies (courtesy of the 1984 VRA). These were nth generation copies, sometimes barely watchable - and the transfer from American NTSC format to European PAL didn't help - but otherwise impossible to see. And, fact fans, I was the compiler of one of Bal's first lists, which I made up for him in return for three tapes: A Clockwork Orange and two Herschell Gordon Lewis titles, The Wizard of Gore and The Gore Gore Girls. Of course in 2019 I have the advantage of being able to watch those three titles in glorious Blu Ray on my shiny Smart TV, but I still have fond memories of trying to work out what was going on in the murk of the VHS tapes, as well as the thrill of actually owning them.

VHS Forever? Part 2 follows on from Mark Wiliams' 2014 documentary VHS Forever? Psychotronic People. Like the original fanzine culture which grew up around the movement, the film is scrappy but passionate, an hour long love letter to a time when acquisition of anything leftfield in the genre involved not only careful sleuthing but also quite a lot of money (a £10 tape - the going rate - in 1985 would be the equivalent of around £30 today). 

The Psychotronic Video Store eventually moved out of its Camden premises to Hanway St in London's West End. By this time my interest in the bootleg VHS market had waned, frustrated by the high prices and poor quality of the reproductions, so I never set foot in the place. But it's great to hear from those that did, a network of geographically diverse people initially linked only by knowing the whereabouts of the shop and their love of weird movies. Those interviewed in this documentary range from casual punters to the more celeb end, in the shape of Jane Giles and Graham Humphreys. Their shared recollections form a kind of mantra of experience, with the common feeling of having stumbled across a decidedly warped Aladdin's cave. Days like these may never return, but Williams does a good job of recreating those exciting times through photographs and fan anecdotes. It's a shame that Bal wasn't interviewed - maybe he doesn't like to look back - but luckily for us many others do. Perhaps Mark's next doc should cover the rise of the fanzine scene of that period? 

London Korean Film Festival 2019: Kokdu: A Story of Guardian Angels (South Korea 2018: Dir Kim Tae-yong)

Kim Tae-yong's fourth feature couldn't be more different to his previous directorial output, beginning in 1999 with the elegiac and spooky Memento Mori, followed up by dramas Family Ties (2006) and Late Autumn (2010).

Described by the director as tapping into the "warmth and nostalgia" of his own childhood, a 'kokdu' is a carved figure attached to a Korean funeral bier that guards the body on its passage from one world to the next.

Two children, brother and sister Dong-min (Go Choi) and Sun-min (Su-an Kim), come across a street trader who they refer to as 'Mr Junkman' selling a box of puppies. Having little money, the puppy vendor is prepared to barter, asking the children to bring items from the family home for trade. Dong-min and Sun-min collect various items, behind the back of their distracted mother, including a pair of floral patterned shoes from their grandmother (Jeong-suk Park), who is very ill.

Exchanging various items, including the shoes, for the puppy, they are clearly immediately besotted. But when they arrive home, grandma has fallen gravely ill and has been taken to hospital. Her only request is that her favourite shoes - the same ones traded for the puppy - are taken to her, so the now regretful children visit the junkyard of the dog vendor to retrieve the items. While searching Sun-min finds a battered kotku discarded among the rubbish: seeing the shoes deep in a tall cylindrical pile of abandoned items, the children reach in but fall into the garbage. And when they emerge on the other side, they find themselves in another world.

Tae-yong's single trick here, and one which requires some patience to adjust to, is to shoot everything we've seen up to now in the real world, and locate the kids' journey to the underworld as a performance in an actual stage play, featuring four adult kokdu - functioning as caregiver, entertainer, guard and guide - who mistakenly believe that Dong-min and Sun-min are dead. The quartet do their best to persuade and cajole the brother and sister to travel from the land of the living, across the mythical Samdocheon river and into the underworld. Most of the film is spent in this theatre bound environment with the kokdu using their various strengths to erroneously escort the siblings. Tae-yong never lets us forget that this is a theatrical production: stage hands are glimpsed, and indeed it is the production's director that initially finds the kids sleeping back stage, after falling through the garbage, and introduces them to the action, which they enter confusedly.

Kokdu: A Story of Guardian Angels takes its stage cues from a successful production of the story performed at the National Gugak Centre in Seoul, and the film is rich in traditional gugak music and dancing: a performance of the ancient Korean 'ganggangsullae' dance is a visual highlight. The magic realist touches extend to footage of grandma, back from the dead and wandering the country roads, flanked by impossibly vivid green fields of grass as she searches for her shoes. She sings of dreams, and of fame being useless, and eventually her character becomes enmeshed in the stage play as she prepares herself to cross over to her final resting place

Kokdu: A Story of Guardian Angels may not always satisfy dramatically, although Su-an Kim should be singled out for a very moving performance as Sun-min and Jeong-suk Park is graceful as the grandmother - and the stage elements, outside of the big set pieces, feel decidedly like community theatre. But what it does successfully achieve is, as Tae-yong intended, a lavish, playful but bitter-sweet attempt to plug into both the director's own cultural upbringing and the visual history of the country: it's also no coincidence that the film in format directly references Korea's oldest (and now lost) film, 1919's Righteous Revenge, in its mixed use of film and stagework. Slighter than I would have liked in some places maybe, but also quietly powerful in others.

Films from FrightFest 2019 #3 - Reviews of The Drone (USA 2019), Dark Sense NEW WAVE OF THE BRITISH FANTASTIC FILM 2020 (UK 2019), Critters Attack (USA 2019), Madness in the Method (USA 2019), I Trapped the Devil (USA 2019) and Spiral (Canada 2018)

The Drone (USA 2019: Dir Jordan Rubin) The director of 2014's Zombeavers uses a plot device straight out of the 1980s classic Child's Play to kick off his hugely enjoyable satire. Here the Charles Lee Ray character is the Violator, a sleazy serial killer whose soul and spirit is transferred into a drone via a passing lightning bolt and a bit of occult code, following a showdown with the cops.

The possessed drone comes into the possession of newlyweds Rachel and Chris who have just moved into their first home and find the thing tossed away in the dustbin. Chris decides to keep it and slyly acquires a compatible remote - which turns out not to be much use. As you might expect with a drone being controlled not by the owners but a peeping tom serial killer within its circuits, it's not long before the machine starts acting up, spying on a sunbathing neighbour (Icelandic actress Anita Briem) and generally setting the household against itself (antics that also cropped in another 2019 FrightFest movie, Kindred Spirits), with tricks like importing a sex tape of the pair onto Chris's laptop for Rachel to find, before upping the ante and offing some of the neighbours. Will the pair realise what's really going on before the drone targets them with its murderous side?

What makes The Drone such great fun is that, despite the ridiculous setup, it's played absolutely straight. As Rachel and Chris, Alex Essoe and John Brotherton have to put up with some really daft lines, but come through it amazingly well. The spirit of the 1980s VHS classics inhabits The Drone totally (the possession of a non sentient object wasn't limited to Child's Play) and the final scenes of gore and mayhem absolutely tap into the excesses of that decade: step forward, we're in Charles Band territory now.

The Drone is a film best seen with an audience, but it's smart enough to survive a solo view too. You won't see it featuring in the awards season, but I was pleased that Rubin had toned down the eye-rollingly obvious parody of his first feature, even though The Drone is a movie that still manages to say nothing about anything much for the duration of its running time. Just dumb gory fun then.

Dark Sense (UK 2019: Dir Magnus Wake) NEW WAVE OF THE BRITISH HORROR FILM 2020  Adapted from the novel 'First and Only' by Peter Flannery, and developed from a 2016 short film Simon, First and Only, Wake's debut feature is impressive, particularly in that its budget was just over £65,000.

Simon (Shane O'Meara) is a young man who has grown up in the knowledge that he has special powers, namely an ability to predict the future, and an empathetic experience of the murder of others. During one of these odd dreams/visions he has a premonition of his own death, and has just five days to locate the person who plans to kill him. He employs a former SAS soldier Steve (Jim Sturgeon) to act as is bodyguard while he tries to identify his nemesis, in reality a serial killer who is murdering all known psychics, and also comes to the attention of MI5, in the shape of Sonia Chatham (Maggie Bain), who realises that his incredible abilities make him both a threat and a possible secret weapon.

If all this sounds like Sunday teatime serial stuff, then in a way you'd be right. For much of Dark Sense, stylistically it feels like watching an extended episode of a British TV police procedural, complete with on point effective soundtrack work from Daniel Elek-Diamanta. Wake has clearly learned his craft well: the camera never lingers enough on anything to show a paucity of budget. But this isn't a criticism. After a shaky start, the film settles into a smart pace, with some likeable characters (the pairing of Steve and Simon works really well in true buddy buddy anti-hero style) and, surprisingly for a low budget movie, an intelligent script which does well to accommodate some of the more, shall we say, ambitious plot devices and stock characters without too much raising of the eyebrows. With plus points for some very atmospheric location shooting in and around Edinburgh, Dark Sense is a movie that, even if it doesn't get a cinematic distribution, should do well on other platforms.

Critters Attack! (USA 2019: Dir Bobby Miller) OK, confession time, I've never seen a 'Critters' film. I know, I know, what kind of genre fan am I? My researches tell me that this is the fifth such film (not including a 7 minute short back in 2014), the last being Critters in Space back in 1992, and staggeringly the franchise is now over thirty years old.

Did we need another one? Well we got one anyway and director Bobby Miller's CV shows him to be a rather talented soul, so I'm guessing he took this project as an homage to a monster movie he grew up with. Critters Attack! wastes no time in bringing back the Krites to a small American town (actually Cape Town, South Africa but we'll let that pass) where plucky Drea (Tashiana Washington, taking a break from more sultry roles to be this movie's gung ho heroine) and her brother Philip (Jaeden Noel) are baby sitting two young charges, Trissy and Jake Lacy (Ava Preston and Jack Fulton). While out in the woods, the quartet discover a wounded white Krite - she's one of the good ones, apparently - who has travelled to earth to take on her dark furred brethren, of which very soon there are many. And really are people still doing the white - good and black - bad thing?

Anyway the bad Krites start to do their rolling, chomping and giggling thing, while Drea and the gang try to get some medical attention for the good Krite in their possession, who they name 'Bianca.' Along the way they learn lessons about teamwork, loyalty, coping with loss and the first stirrings of young love. Oh and Dee Wallace turns up (she was in the first film) as a bounty hunter, unimaginatively called Dee.

Despite this apparently being a TV Movie, there's no shortage of gore, although most of it is reserved for Krite deaths. It's well photographed and builds up a decent head of steam towards the climax, and Ms Washington makes for a spunky lead. But it's all rather unnecessary, frustratingly polite, the jokes are really lame, and after one too many schmaltzy music queues to signpost the arrival of another moral lesson uttered by one of the cast, I concluded that I had no inclination to search out the Critters back catalogue.

Madness in the Method (USA 2019: Dir Jason Mewes) Meta just got funny in this comedy thriller from Mewes, who of course was Jay to Kevin Smith's Silent Bob in most of the latter's movies. Smith turns up as himself here along with Brian O'Halloran and a bevy of stars including Dean Cain, Teri Hatcher, Vinnie Jones and Danny Trejo. Mewes is also himself, or a version of it anyway.

When we meet Jason he's down on his luck, trying to get into straight parts but forever doomed to be typecast in stoner buddy roles. Recommended by Smith to purchase a famous book on method acting, after he consumes the first few chapters he borrows his mate Vinnie Jones's motor and drives out to have a chat with the latest director who has failed to give him a part (Matt Willis) and accidentally runs him over after they fight. Mewes realises that notoriety is key to fame, and as his name rises up the popularity pole on celebrity websites, and pursued by a drunk police detective who fancies him as the murderer, he embarks on a killing spree in pursuit of his dream role, the titular hero of an adaptation of 'The Odyssey' planned by Brian O'Halloran.

Madness in the Method is a weird hybrid of US and UK locations and humour (it was filmed in LA and Derby!) but sadly it's not very successful. More amusing in its early stages, once the film has played its hand - Mewes, desperate for acting respect, becomes more and more deranged - it becomes rather samey, and the movie seems overlong at 99 minutes. The humour, as you might expect, is pretty broad, which functions better in the interplay between the cast and the sending up of the movie industry, less so when the cast are left to develop their own characters (Danny Trejo method playing a gay man is pretty dodgy, but adulte terrible Teri Hatcher as Mewes's hard as nails agent fares better).

Whether you like Madness in the Method sort of depends on whether you're a fan of Kevin Smith films, to which this movie closely follows the template (and Kevin Smith gets to do some of his trademark f-bomb filled rants if that's your bag). Hmmm.

I Trapped the Devil (USA 2019: Josh Lobo) An independent three hander which restricts its action to a small shack, this one has to win the 'does-what-it-says-on-the-tin' title award. Matt (AJ Bowen) and his wife Karen (Susan Burke) decide to pay a Yuletide visit to Matt's reclusive brother Steve (Scott Poythress). Steve is reluctant to let them in, which is perhaps unsurprising, as he seems to have trapped the devil in his basement behind a locked door. Has Steve gone totally bonkers and imprisoned an innocent person, or does her really have the dark lord under lock and key? Newspapers lining the windows, complex maps connecting newspaper incidents pasted on the ceiling and a loaded gun attest to the former, but the insidious voice that emanates from the basement door suggests Steve may have a point.

"This is less about keeping someone in as it is about keeping everyone else out" claims one of the cast during the movie, which is a rather good summary of the ebb and flow of the whole film. This is less a narratively strong movie than a mood piece which invites the audience to transfer its allegiances between the cast as the story develops. It's above all a study of faith and kinship, and while it takes a while to reach a suitably hallucinogenic conclusion. I Trapped the Devil manages effectively to get under the skin.

Spiral (Canada 2018: Dir Kurtis David Harder) Harder's two previous features have been rather lukewarm thrillers, with 2011's Cody Fitz and incontrol from 2017.

His latest is rather a film of two halves. Set in a less tolerant 1995, Malik and his older partner Aaron (Jeffrey Bowyer-Chapman and Ari Cohen) are a same sex couple who decide to move away from the big city to a small town together with Kayla (Jennifer Laporte), who is Aaron's natural daughter from a previous heterosexual relationship. The trio seem happy although some tensions lie beneath the surface between the two adults: Aaron is a stay at home writer struggling to write his next bestseller, while Malik has a 'proper' job to bring home the bacon. Aaron has time on his hands and starts to check out the locals, finding them a rather conservative bunch. But there's also something more sinister at work. He discovers after a break in to their home the word FAGGOTS written on the wall, and purchases a security system as a result: but he doesn't tell Aaron the reason, seeking to protect his newly out partner. Malik's concern deepens when he witnesses some form of ritual inside one of the townspeople's homes, which involves a young boy called Tyler, who has just started to date Kyla.

For me the second half of the movie - a kind of Race with the Devil (1975) chase fest - wasn't a strong as the sustained build up, which was pretty much my experience with Jordan Peele's Get Out (2018) too, of which this could be seen to be a gay version. Bowyer-Chapman and Cohen convince as the couple whose difference in age and gay experience creates added tension in the movie: Malik airs his concerns by telephone to a previous partner rather than confiding in Aaron, and the fact that Malik is of colour ups the prejudice ante. We've all seen the robed-coven-hiding-among-nice-townspeople setup many times before, and it's the least interesting aspect of the film. But the lead up is great. Of course this should be seen as a state of the US movie (although it's actually Canadian) and the cyclical plot hook is evidence that the more things change, the more they stay the same. Not bad at all.

Films from FrightFest 2019 #2 - Reviews of Knives and Skin (USA 2019), Kindred Spirits (USA 2019), I'll Take Your Dead (Canada 2018), Feedback (Spain/USA 2019), Extracurricular (Canada 2018) and The Dark Red (USA 2018)

Knives and Skin (USA 2019: Dir Jennifer Reeder) Reeder is predominantly a short film maker, which comes through in the  abstract shorthand of her latest feature, where the surface sheen suggests deeper thematic currents. Knives and Skin's story revolves around a death: high school student Carolyn Harper (Raven Whitley) has refused to put out for the local soccer jock Andy Kitzmiller (Ty Olwin) while out in the hills on a date, and now she lies dead in a patch of scrubland. Her mother Lisa (Marika Engelhardt) is distraught, but Andy fails to come forward as the last person to see her. Against this backdrop the affairs of the town and its interconnected personalities unfold, principally around Andy’s complex sister Joanna (Grace Smith), whose has a fractured relationship with her mentally ill mother Lynn (Audrey Francis), and who sells Lynn’s underwear and prescription pills to schoolteachers.

The most obvious analog for Knives and Skin is Twin Peaks, not only in the centring of the story around a missing (and subsequently dead) girl, but also the air of sadness that envelops the town, the doomed lives of those living in it and the woozy manner in which the action of the film is played out (it also nods to Rivers Edge (1986) and to some extent 1988's Heathers), but Knives and Skin is a successful film in its own right.

Although the period in which the film is set, like so much of Knives and Skin, is hard to pin down, the music used is largely from the 1980s. Songs sung acapella by the school choir - managed by Lisa Harper - derive from mixtapes which Andy's father finds in the garage. A sense of the end of innocence threads through songs which should be joyous but instead are rendered mournfully and heartbreakingly. In essence this is a small town film where the kids long to escape and the adults are trapped in convoluted emotional nets of their own making. Perhaps because it was so different to pretty much everything else playing at FrightFest this year it couldn't help but stand out, although its languid plotting and narrative occlusion divided the audience.

Kindred Spirits (USA 2019: Dir Lucky McKee) Here's a real return to the b*nny b*iler movies of way back when, right down to the play on words title. Thora Birch stars as mum Chloe, whose daughter Nicole is approaching her 18th birthday, when Chloe's sister Sadie appears from nowhere after having lost contact with the family for the last 12 months.

In contrast to the rather staid Chloe, Sadie is, initially anyway, a breath of fresh air, teaming up with Nicole for joint shopping trips where she's delighted to be mistaken for Nicole's sister. But as usual with this type of thing, Chloe's sister slowly transforms from trendy aunt to something way more psychotic, and it's not long before Sadie's bedding Nicole's nice but dim boyfriend Alex, and getting between Chloe and her new beau Shay - Alex's dad. And then things get really nasty.

McKee's first film since the 2017 thriller Blood Money thematically develops the concept of the raging female first unveiled in his debut feature, 2007's May, and front and centred in his extraordinary The Woman (a 2011 sequel of sorts to 2009's Offspring). Like the movies it references (Single White Female I'm looking at you) Kindred Spirits doesn't offer up a particularly positive view of women, but it's rattlingly well made: the soundtrack's Bernard Hermannisms and excerpts from 'Swan Lake' invite you to have fun, but Sadie's motivations aren't straightforward. In hands less talented than McKee's this could merely have been a clumsy homage, but instead it's a very entertaining love letter to some of the movies that inspired the director to get behind a camera, a movie that knows exactly what it's doing.

I'll Take Your Dead (Canada 2018: Dir Chad Archibald) This rather odd little thriller, the latest from the director of 2017's The Heretics, may never quite make up its mind what kind of a film it wants to be, but is nevertheless a diverting if slightly unsatisfying jumble of styles and genres.

William aka The Candy Butcher (Aidan Devine), a former farmer who has somehow got into the trade of being paid to chemically dispose of dead bodies left for him by local gangs, lives on a remote homestead with his daughter Gloria (Ava Preston). Gloria is fully witting of dad's sideline but understands that "good people sometimes do bad things." She also has the ability to see dead people: or is it her guilty conscience manifesting the angry spirits of the dismembered?

When one gang leader drops off a load of corpses for disposal, William is surprised when one of them, Jackie (Jess Salgueiro) isn't actually dead. William chains her to the bed until he can decide what to do with her, but a bond forms between Jackie and Gloria, whose mother died of cancer and for whom Jackie becomes a surrogate parent. But the gang finds out that one of their consignment is alive and kicking, forcing this new found family to do battle with the bad guys.

For most of I'll Take Your Dead, the film is a reasonably tense thriller, with some impressively gruesome severed limbs FX by James Anthony Young. Where it slightly comes apart is the injection of supernatural elements which jar rather than satisfy. The three central performances of Devine, Salgueiro and Preston are arguably better than the material they're offered, the latter particularly fine as a young girl on the threshold of puberty determined to see the good in her father despite the way he makes his living. 

Atmospherically photographed in wintry Canada, while the movie never drags it's overall just a bit too bitty to really admire, but there's enough going on to sustain interest.

Feedback (Spain/USA 2019: Dir Pedro C Alonso) Eddie Marsan excels as controversial talk radio host Jarvis Dolan in this tense, pared down thriller. Dolan, a kind of James O'Brien type figure, used to baiting Brexiteers live on the radio, and who has recently been abducted and returned (presumably for his stance on political issues), is facing a tough time with station boss Norman Burgess (Anthony Head in a bit part). Burgess wants Dolan to dial down the rhetoric and re-unite with celebrity focused DJ Andrew Wilde (Paul Anderson) with whom he previously enjoyed a successful on air relationship. But although Dolan agrees to team up with his ex-radio partner, he still has one more opportunity to be the scourge of the airwaves. Or does he? Just as he's about to play a recording likely to get someone else in hot water, he's isolated in his booth, and two masked men overcome the staff at the studio, including rookie assistant Claire and producer Anthony. These men have an agenda involving both Dolan and Wilde and it most certainly isn't about leaving the European Union.

And that's the basic setup for Alonso's war of nerves which follows. Although the studio environment adds to the claustrophobia of the piece, the whole radio station setup is really just a McGuffin for events to follow, and I was expecting much more to be made of the whole 'are we on the air'? possibilities. Feedback is basically one long standoff of shifting allegiances and 'will they get out alive?' cliffhangers. The real motive behind the studio takeover, which eventually leads to the final reel revelation, can't be disclosed for spoiler reasons. But this is Marsan's film. By turns aggressive, pitiful, resourceful and downright cunning, it's fun seeing the power balances swing to and fro. But at its heart it's basically a one set thriller, no more, no less, diverting for its hour and a half run time and increasingly tense, but its effectiveness lies in the economy of its execution, rather than anything it might be trying to convey as a film. Good fun while it lasts though.

Extracurricular (Canada 2018: Dir Ray Xue) There's a danger these days that any film depicting lawlessness or moral redundancy can taken as a coded comment about where society is heading and perhaps more importantly the politics that's going to take us there: The Purge movies are a good case in point.

Ray Xue's sophomore feature concerning teen violence, which originally played at the 2018 Toronto After Dark festival, arguably dodges that bullet firstly by being set in that nice Canada, whose smartly dressed current President contrasts healthily with his more gauche, warmongering counterpart across the border, and who couldn't possibly ever be seen as being at the helm of societal destruction. And secondly its youthful killers are more likely to ally themselves to literary rather than chaos theory - think American Psycho rather than, er Psycho.

Extracurricular focuses on four students, who happen to share the same classes, and who find time in their hectic school schedule for a bit of the old ultra violence. Under cover of darkness, the quartet plan and execute (literally) attacks on unsuspecting dwellers in remote homes. The human choices are random but, once selected, meticulously thought out and scoped, right down to credit ratings - and none of their victims survive. Their only dilemma is the extent to which their deadly excursions are planned or improvised using whatever is available. Sensible Ian (Spencer Macpherson) wants to leave nothing to chance, whereas his brother Derek is increasingly interested in chance and randomness to drive events: "this is supposed to be fun, not school," he says. Derek's girlfriend Jenny and their friend Miriam make up the foursome, and their wholesome smugness and unlikeliness to profile as suspects - handy in that Ian and Derek's dad (Luke Goss) is the town sheriff - mean that they can effectively hide in plain sight, even planning their next attack in class during breaks.

Xue accentuates the intellectual underpinning of the quartet's credo of violence by drawing parallels with the colonial forces' extermination of the indigenous tribes in the Pequot Wars, which their teacher, Mr Vollman, discusses in class. "The moral argument is an illusion," responds one of the four, to which Vollman warns of the danger of "confusing Nietzsche with adolescent testosterone."

But Miriam is clearly starting to doubt the motives of her gang. She is just embarking on her first relationship - a same sex one with Layla, a classmate - and she's torn between loyalty to the group and her friend. At home the camera lingers on childhood photos of her, inviting us to speculate how someone from such a seemingly well adjusted family could get into this. Is it nature or nurture? It also brings forth the question as to how foursome ever broached the subject of their joint passion in the first place?

Extracurricular's second half, which moves firmly into You're Next style home invasion territory, isn't as satisfying as the cool as a cucumber first, and the characters of the four are never developed enough for the audience to really care about their outcomes. But it's good to see a post modern horror movie that doesn't play it for laughs or irony, and the moral dilemma running through Extracurricular is persuasive enough, even if one does ending up rooting for the killers and then feeling slightly dirty about it afterwards.

The Dark Red (USA 2018: Dir Dan Bush) Bush is a talented director/writer/producer who brought us the excellent movie The Signal back in 2007 (was it really 12 years ago?). In The Dark Red he's turned out another great, atmospheric low budget movie which fizzes with ideas.

Sybil Warren (a brilliant performance from April Billingsley) was taken into care as a child, and as we meet her is being interviewed by a psychiatric assessor, Dr Deluse (Kelsey Scott) to assess whether she can be released from the hospital where she's currently incarcerated. Via a series of interviews we hear of Sybil's life: her meeting with partner David (Conal Byrne); her perceived powers of mind reading; her pregnancy, and of the events that befell her after meeting David's parents, where she maintains that her baby was taken from her by C-Section for reasons which, for most of the movie, remain unclear.

Dr Deluse remains unconvinced, feeling that Sybil may be creating stories in her head to compensate for more fundamental mental health issues and childhood trauma. But Warren remains convinced that what she has recounted is true, and remains determined to find out the truth about her past.

The Dark Red is very much in thrall to early David Cronenberg - Scanners is clearly an influence - and much of the film is delivered in a deliberately distancing way, with flashbacks within flashbacks, Sybil's voiceover, or the cold analytical assessment sessions in which the story is pieced together. Its pace is slow but absorbing, and you're never quite sure where it's headed next. Arguably there are too many elements at work here and they don't all get room for full development, but the film is intriguingly dystopian and Billingsley's performance strikes the right balance between vulnerability and power. Recommended.

Films from FrightFest 2019 #1 - Reviews of Come to Daddy (Canada/New Zealand/ Ireland/USA 2019) Rock, Paper and Scissors (Argentina 2019), Dark Encounter (UK 2019), Dachra (Tunisia 2019), The Wind (USA 2018) and Girl on the Third Floor (USA 2019)

Come to Daddy (Canada/New Zealand/ Ireland/USA 2019: Dir Ant Timpson) Timpson's debut feature is a knowing, slyly funny comedy thriller, full of quirks and tics and with a mid point twist that I am unable to reveal but which is pivotal in transporting the movie from its somewhat awkward first half. Narval Greenwood (Elijah Wood who, like Leonardo Di Caprio, is an actor I can never unsee from his youth) is a supposed DJ and media star - although that might just be bluster - who is summoned by letter back to his dad's beachside home after thirty years of estrangement. Once he arrives, he finds that dad is a drunken wreck with little interest in his son, and concludes that the letter must have been written on one of pop's benders.

Narval isn't without problems himself - a recovering alcoholic, he's clearly trying to be a better person (a copy of 'The Celestine Prophecy' is his go to book) and because he was five when dad left the family home, he has no recollection of him. The pair fall out almost immediately and when dad drunkenly attacks him with a cleaver, it looks like the homecoming might be shortlived. But a fatal heart attack halts pop in his tracks, and Narval must deal with the aftermath. Things aren't helped by the coroners office having an oversupply of bodies, necessitating dad's embalmed corpse being returned to the family house prior to interment. A very distressed Narval struggles to cope with the situation, and when he hears noises suggesting that dad might be trying to communicate from beyond the grave...well the night is just getting started.

And there we must leave it plot wise. Come to Daddy's subsequent delights very much place it in the Friday-night-beer-with-your-mates category. It's definitely a film to see with an audience, and its feel is very much in Martin McDonagh territory, all one liners and quirky plot twists. But like McDonagh's work it sometimes feels that we're watching the results of clever scriptwriting sessions rather than a realistic film. Which is an issue as Come to Daddy struggles for emotional heft but misses its aim (Wood again, I'm afraid, whose continued state of saucer-eyed wonder never gives us anything more than constant surprise). It's great to see Martin Donovan and Michael Smiley enjoying themselves (again in roles I can't describe for spoiler reasons), and although, again like McDonagh's output there's an occasional whiff of misogyny, it's fun to watch but, despite its emotional pretensions, slightly insubstantial.

Rock, Paper and Scissors aka Piedra, papel y tijera (Argentina 2019: Dir Martín Blousson and Macarena García Lenzi) This rather extraordinary independent movie filters the spirit of Almodovar via Misery and Jack Clayton's 1967 feature Our Mother's House, in a story of three siblings who reunite after the death, by suicide, of their father.

As the title suggests, the trio of ill starred grown up children manage their lives together like the eponymous game, with each one taking it in turns to best the other. Magdalena (Augustina Cerviño), an actress, returns to the family home to deal with their father's estate and make sure she gets her part of the inheritance. On the surface she is the most sensible of the three, keen to sort things out and get on with her life as quickly as possible. Her half sister María José (Valeria Giorcelli) and brother Jesús (Pablo Sigal) seem to be almost housebound, ostensibly normal but gradually exposing themselves as barely developed adults.

Magdalena's attempts to wind up their affairs are thwarted when she falls downstairs (or was she pushed?) and is confined to bed with her injuries. She is tended to by Maria José who seems to have an obsession with The Wizard of Oz - and indeed the film is full of nods to that film, not least the characters milling round the bed-bound Magdalena/Dorothy. Meanwhile Jesús is making a shot on camcorder horror film, where the principal actor is María José. As the trio take it in turns to outwit each other, tensions in the household increase: it cannot end happily.

Adapted from a stage play by Garcia Lenzi, this is a claustrophobic and unsettling chamber piece, soporific in pace and profoundly weird. Both Cerviño and Giorcelli reprise their parts from the stage version and bring a thespian intensity to the proceedings. It's a film full of very odd little details, superbly and dully photographed in a confined space and with great attention to detail in the colour palette. It's not a film for everyone, but its sense of quiet menace makes it a worthy addition to the crazies-in-a-house genre that covers everything from Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? and Spider Baby through to Chabrol's La Ceremonie.

Dark Encounter (UK 2019: Dir Carl Strathie) Hot on the heels of Strathie's debut feature, the astronaut-stuck-in-a-space-capsule Solis, the Scottish director returns with his low budget take on Close Encounters of the Third Kind with added metaphysical elements.

Filmed as 'The Encounter', with the word 'Dark' added for additional marquee value (unnecessarily but rather fittingly as it turns out - the movie is pretty much all shot at night), it's set in Pennsylvania in 1983, one year to the day following the abduction of 8 year old Maisie from her parents' home. Mum and dad, Olivia and Ray, have gathered for dinner with Olivia's sister and other members of the family. While the search is still going on for the missing girl, tensions within the household continue to run high, exacerbated by the guilt felt by the parents in that they left Maisie home alone on the evening she disappeared.

But when a series of strange lights are witnessed in the forest, and all the electrics in the house begin to malfunction, it becomes clear that something extraterrestrial has visited them. And the inter-galaxy visitors have a specific purpose.

Like Solis before it, Dark Encounter was almost totally filmed in the modest Goldfinch studios in North Yorkshire (an enterprising studio that's in the process of launching its own streaming channel) and utilising the same FX team and soundtrack musician from the first film. The problem with Dark Encounter is that setting it in the US when it patently wasn't filmed in that country means that the film never rings true. Additionally a UK cast are all required to adopt US accents, some much more convincingly than others (the normally dependable Alice Lowe, as Olivia's sister Arlene, is particularly problematic here). But the movie's biggest problem - aside from that silly generic title that suggests a 1990s softcore thriller - is its unevenness: in setting up its last reel twist/reveal you have to sit through a rather dull first hour, interspersed with the FX team mounting a few incongruous set pieces. There's no doubt that Strathie is a competent, if not particularly exciting director who has assembled a good team to work with, but I feel everyone has just bitten off too much with this one. You have to wait a long time for something to happen, and when it does, it's both silly and in rather poor taste, and no amount of heavenly choirs and soaring strings can disguise that fact.

Dachra (Tunisia 2018: Dir Abdelhamid Bouchnak) At FrightFest last year South African chiller The Tokoloshe played to largely unmoved audiences, who remained divided over its effectiveness in telling the story of a demonic force preying on a young girl and a cleaning lady in urban Johannesburg. In keeping with the Festival's commitment to screen fright flicks from around the globe. Dachra shares with The Tokoloshe the uneasiness of the existence of primal and demonic fears within a continent's belief and economic systems. But where last year's film remained distinctly 'other' in its treatment of subject matter, Dachra appropriates the language of western horror movies to tell its story.

Supposedly based on a true story, a line which is harder to swallow as the movie progresses, the film revolves around the continued belief in witchcraft among rural communities, which is still an issue in parts of North Africa. Three journalism students, investigating potential subject matter for a final year video documentary, are introduced by one of their number, Walid (Aziz Jbali) to a story about Mongia (Hela Ayed), a hospitalised woman who for the 20 years of her incarceration has been regarded as a witch. Walid and his study partners Yassmine (Yassmine Dimassi) and Bilel (Bilel Slatnia) bribe their way into the hospital to interview Mongia, but all they come away with is the knowledge about Dachra, the village that the strange woman originally came from. The trio decide to locate the village, but when they arrive, after the initial friendliness of the occupants wears off, things take a darker turn when their car breaks down and they become isolated in the rural community: and of course there is no mobile signal. The students gradually piece together the truth about what's happening in the village, the evil that exists within the community and, equally worryingly, the inhabitants' dietary requirements.

As well as being Tunisia's first horror film Dachra scores a double whammy in being Bouchnak's first feature. This shows in places - it's about half an hour too long with a mid section that could do with some editing, and some of the casting is a little questionable (the students look a little long in the tooth, for example). But until it veers into grand guignol territory in the last half hour and a climax which ties up the plot points a little too tidily, it's an interesting meditation on a country that is keen to progress but is mired in traditional beliefs and customs, and it's to be praised for making religion key to the story rather than merely a plot device. Filmed in authentically bleak Tunisian locations, Dachra does well to remain gripping in the company of a cast of largely unlikeable characters. It also sat rather uneasily alongside some of FrightFest's more mainstream fare, but on reflection that was probably to the film's advantage.

The Wind (USA 2018: Dir Emma Tammi) Nothing is what it seems in Tammi's extremely eerie and atmospheric story of a frontier woman confronting a combination of ancient evil and the demons of her own mind in 1800s mid west America.

Caitlin Gerard is exceptional as Lizzy Macklin, who with her husband Isaac (Ashley Zukerman) has taken a plot of land and a farmhouse in a god forsaken (literally as it turns out) part of the prairies.

At some point afterwards a younger couple, Emma and Gideon Harper (Julia Goldani Telles and Dylan McTee) become their neighbours - well if you can call people living a mile away neighbours, that is. Lizzy and Isaac have suffered sadness in their lives, and the arrival of newcomers from St Louis, Missouri, also hoping for a new start, initially lifts Lizzy's spirits. But when Emma becomes pregnant she begins to fear the presence of something terrible in her midst, which in turns stirs Lizzy's memories of her own past.

Tammi chops up her narrative so that the viewer is never sure whether they're in the past or the present, but unlike, say Nic Roeg's frantic time slicing, The Wind's mood is at times almost elegiac. The movie begins with a terrible moment - the aftermath of the death of a child - and the mood scarcely rises above the deeply sombre, pausing only for scenes of a nascent friendship between the two women, before those are replaced with a sense of rising dread. Lizzy's mind becomes as fractured as the sequence of images before us, gradually unveiling a force older than the bible which stalks the prairies, sometimes appearing as little more than a shadow on the wall or a noise in the wind, other times as something far more visceral. It's quietly powerful stuff, framed by Lyn Moncreif's static, unflinching photography.

Based on a 2012 short film The Winter, made by The Wind's scriptwriter Teresa Sutherland, but not suffering the fate of many shorts developed into overstretched features, this is an impressive debut by anyone's standards. With the imposing and inhospitable wilds of New Mexico as a backdrop, and the war between superstition and progress being waged quietly but forcefully, it leaves a powerful impression.

Girl on the Third Floor (USA 2019: Dir Travis Stevens) This rather uneven comedy/horror sees dad to be Don Koch (a Jon Hamm-esque Phil Brooks aka C.M. Punk, sporting ink in places where other people don't have places) moving into a rather large fixer upper house, and deciding to take on all the home improvements himself. In the course of this he discovers an additional floor to his home - rather oddly including a minstrel gallery - when part of the second floor ceiling falls though. He's against the clock to get the house in shape as his wife Liz (Trieste Kelly Dunn) is about to become a mother.

But we soon learn that Dan is not exactly dad-of-the-year material when he gets it on with passing flirty neighbour Sarah (Sarah Yates) who just happens to stop by to hold his hammer. Dan's also a reformed alcoholic who has previously been prosecuted for fraud. So you know, all round good catch.

Realising that he may may made the wrong moral choice Dan subsequently 'ghosts' the girl, which is ironic as that's what she turns out to be (can you 'ghost' a ghost?). Sarah's not taking no for an answer, that's for sure, and Liz is due home at any moment. What's a guy to do?

I'm guessing Girl on the Third Floor was chosen for its festival friendly vibes, as it's not a movie to tax the intellect. There are elements of the Hammer House of Horror episode 'The House That Bled to Death' in the amount of gloop that pours out of the walls and light fittings. I was also reminded of George Wendt being menaced in Steve Miner's 1985 comedy House, and of course spooked caretaker Jack Torrance in The Shining. It's a rather laboured haunted house story that tries to say something about gender and alpha-maledom (the house's origin was a brothel) but despite this subtext and Mr Punk's very physical performance, it wasn't for me.

Interview with Alexandre Aja, director of Crawl (2019)

Alexandre Aja

The French director Alexandre Aja was in town recently to promote his new film Crawl, which premiered on the first night of London's annual FrightFest scary movie weekender.

I interviewed Alexandre on the afternoon before the movie screened and asked him first about the positive critical reception the film has attracted in those countries where it's already opened. He was surprised at the press reaction thus far, which had been almost overwhelmingly positive for a film he called "just another gator movie..." "I had a lot of fun making Piranha 3D, Horns and The 9th Life of Louis Drax," Aja explained, "but in those years of moving away from the (horror) genre I kept going as an audience member watching all these great movies like Don't Breathe." The director longed to return to his first love, the fright flick. "It's in my DNA," he commented, to make films that put the audience "on the edge of their seat, to create an immersive experience for them."

Aja was attracted by the script for Crawl, and the simplicity of its story: "I received the script - it was on a Friday and I couldn't read it right away - but I remember reading the log line that came with it, a very simple story about this young woman trying to save her dad in the middle of a category 5 storm in a flood zone infested with alligators! It was exactly what I needed - it was the perfect combination of survival and fear elements."

Aja had three movies in his mind when he was making his latest: Alien, The Impossible and Cujo, and the claustrophobia and tension of those films is perfectly reflected in Crawl. I asked him about the filming conditions, as most of the movie is spent with the principal actors up to their necks in dirty flood water. "It was very very difficult, but you'd have to ask the actors," he told me. Although Crawl is a survival movie Aja felt that "it was a survival movie to make the movie."

I asked him about the process of making the film, in that the combination of practical and CGI effects, and the vast quantities of water involved, looked like a logistical nightmare. "Making a movie costs a lot of money, so you don't have the time to redo things - you need to know exactly what you're doing. I work a lot on the script - the script is the most important thing - and I do shot lists for every sequence, but also it's about working with the actors, the blocking, and how they're going to own the space." Aja thought this was particularly important when working with such a confined setup. "The way they interact with each other is the key to whether a scene is going to be believable or not." Commenting on his cast, he paid tribute to the resilience of his lead players. "Kaya (Scodelario, who plays Haley) and Barry (Pepper, as Haley's father Dave) were absolute troopers." When he asked Kaya if she was sure that she was ok with what was to come, Aja said that she wanted to make the movie to show her son how badass she could be. "And she was definitely badass," confirmed the director.

Of the alligators, arguably the real stars of Crawl, Aja let me into a secret: "There were no real alligators on set. There were just stuntmen dressed in full green suit spandex." While this might make the gator action sound a little, er, naff, the reality is quite different. The CGI is effectively and sparingly applied, mixed seamlessly with practical effects, and doesn't dilute in any way from the overall verisimilitude of the piece. But Aja also gives credit to the actors, who made a great job of pretending that the threat was real.

Was Aja happy with the finished film? "I wanted it to be so intense that it puts you on the edge of your seat," He explained "I wanted it to be the kind of movie where you feel the temperature is rising in the room, because people are really nervous. What I love most in a movie theatre is that experience where we (the audience) all live the story." He likened the creation of Crawl to a rollercoaster ride. "You know when you have to go down, you know when you have to leave some breathing space, and when you don't. And I don't think this movie has a lot of breathing space - it's pretty intense." He's dead right there.

Crawl is in cinemas now.