Festival Coverage by Andrew Swafford and Jessica Carr
Jessica: Well, it was certainly a weird year to have a Horror Festival considering it feels like 2020 itself has been a living nightmare. I really do appreciate all the hard work that the Knoxville Horror Fest team put into making this year’s festival feel safe. They hosted all of the evening features at the Parkway Drive-in in Maryville and created two different tracks for daytime festival goers knowing that theater space was going to be at a limited capacity. Also, all theater attendees were required to wear masks at all times, which was really comforting to me. Overall, I thought it was extremely hit-and-miss this year with features and shorts. I’m sure they had a very limited pool to choose from, and that may have hurt the festival’s lineup. Still, it was great to be able to watch Evil Dead 2 at a drive-in and so that’ll probably be my favorite takeaway.
Andrew: This was a very different Knox Horror Film Festival than those of years past, and not only just because of COVID precautions – most importantly, the lineup this year was made up almost entirely of classic films (like Evil Dead 2) and only two 2020 features (The Stylist and Possessor) were spotlighted. KHFF has always screened a handful of classic films in years past (it was the 2015 fest where I saw Texas Chain Saw Massacre for the first time!), but this year particularly felt like a celebration of that type of programming, which was an appropriate fit for the socially distanced drive-in theater that served as this festival’s home base. I’m with you, Jessica, in not loving every offering, but that’s partially just par for the course with any festival and, for me, an unintended consequence of the drive-in setting. It’s easier to feel unengaged from a film while sitting alone in a car watching a distant screen, and having to wait for the sun to go down before starting the first feature means I’m too tired to feel thrilled by the time the third feature begins. For all it’s unique pleasures and frustrations, though, this isn’t a festival experience I’ll soon forget.
Silent film pianist Ben Model helping introduce Knoxferatu V
Knoxferatu V
Andrew: Knoxferatu, a celebration of silent horror programmed and hosted by local enthusiast Kelly Robinson, has directly preceded the Knox Horror Film Fest for five years running, and in my coverage of last year’s KHFF, I made the case that it should be seen as the true first day of the fest. This year, the event was titled Knoxferatu V, and as the event page pointed out, “The V doesn't just stand for Knoxferatu's fifth year – it also stands for VIRTUAL.” Instead of packing cinephiles into a darkened theater, Robinson streamed the event live on YouTube, which allowed her to also beam in the assistance of New York pianist Ben Model, who provided a classical / ragtime score for the whole program, completely improvised as it often would have been in the silent era.
The remote score was the virtual setting’s greatest gift, but it was briefly accompanied by one of 2020’s trademark curses: technical difficulties. Connection difficulties on the front end and mic noise during Kelly’s always fascinating opening spiel both served as an early reminder that this year’s festival would be a different beast – but once the films started rolling, the rest of the event went smoothly.The change in setting led to a more scaled back program this year, and there was no big feature serving as the headliner of the event. Instead, it was simply a program of silent shorts, which are often the highlight of these events.
One aspect of the programming that went unremarked upon, however, was that this year’s shorts program served as a greatest hits of sorts from the last four years of Knoxferatu: The Merry Skeleton played at the first Knoxferatu in 2016; “Au Secours” played at the second, and The Thieving Hand played at the third. I adore these last two titles, which are energized by an imaginative playfulness that is now reserved exclusively for the world of children’s cartoons. Au Secours, specifically, has many gags that would feel right at home in a Spongebob episode, including incongruous cutaways to fearsome animals in their natural habitats.
Alongside these three old favorites, two “new” shorts were included in the lineup. The first of these, The Rarebit Fiend, has a fun concept (a man eats some fucked up cheese and has hallucinatory dreams) and serves as a special effects showcase – I especially liked the moment when the protagonist’s bed spins around wildly in a miniaturized bedroom. The film that closed the program, however – Dr. Pyckle and Mr. Pryde – didn’t do much for me at all. As the title suggests, it’s a riff on the Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde story, only this adaptation is spearheaded by Stan Laurel (of “and Hardy” fame) and the repeated gag is that the “evil” that Laure’s Hyde gets up to is comically small-scale (he tormenting people with fingertraps, for example), but for me, the jokes were far too tepid and infrequent to justify this short’s 21-minute running time.
Regardless of my feelings on the individual films on offer this year, I’m always delighted to attend a Knoxferatu event, even when it’s being beamed into my own home. This is the purest part of the KHFF tradition, and I hope it never goes away.
Evil Dead 2 (1987) by Sam Raimi
Andrew: Like Knoxferatu, the Horror Fest proper is also doing somewhat of a greatest hits this year – almost every feature in this year’s lineup has some sort of connection to films featured in prior years. Return of the Living Dead, for example, shares a common ancestor with Zombi 2, which headlined the fest in 2018; Demons was written and produced by Dario Argento, whose operatic masterpiece Suspiria played back in 2017; and of course one of the biggest draws from last year’s festival was a new restoration of the OG Evil Dead, now followed by this year’s KHFF screening of Evil Dead 2.
Read Andrew’s review of the first Evil Dead as part of last year’s KHFF coverage
This screening, as Jessica mentioned, was an obvious highlight of the weekend due to the movie’s many obvious pleasures. The whole first act seems to play on fast forward, Bruce Campbell’s performance is magnetic, the makeup and special effects are inspired, and the camerawork is legitimately insane, one-upping even the first film’s unhinged sprints through the set. This classic cabin-in-the-woods narrative hits a long stride in the middle stretch, after Ash has gone off the deep end but before the second party of cabin-dwellers shows up. Bruce Campbell fighting his own hand is a major highlight for me (and maybe an accidental parallel with Knoxferatu’s “The Thieving Hand”?), as is the silent-era gag of Campbell being confronted by his own reflection.
I do have a small disconnect with every film in this beloved franchise, which is the simple fact that I can’t maintain its sustained energy level – I always end up getting tired halfway through, and that’s not just late-night drive-in fatigue. By the time Ash grafts himself a chainsaw arm, I’m always feeling a little beat. What about you, Jessica? This was your favorite screening of the weekend, right?
Jessica: It was 100% my fave feature. This was my second viewing of the film, and I think I fell in love with it even more. It's a great way to kick off a Horror Festival in my opinion. I love that this film is silly and energetic, but also has some genuinely scary imagery in it. The dancing skeletal dead woman's body still freaks me out, even if the sequence is meant to be silly.
Andrew, I actually don’t find that the film exhausts me. It kind of has the opposite effect where I feel the energy building and building on itself. When you start to think, "What is Raimi gonna do next?" Then, he pulls out something like your own hand getting possessed and trying to attack you – creating a slapstick scene that nobody else could have pulled off like Bruce Campbell does. I've grown to really appreciate the Evil Dead movies over the years, especially since we’ve had an influx of horror comedies recently; I think this one really hits the nail on the head.
The Stylist (2020) by Jill Gevargizian
Jessica: I was really excited to see a female-directed horror film in this year’s lineup. Overall, I can say that I did like The Stylist. I do have a couple of problems with it, but I can say that with the ending they were fully committed to the bit they were doing and I have no choice but to praise that. The film is about a psychotic hair stylist that slices off the hair (and scalp) of certain female clients. She wears the hair as a kind of ritual after each kill. In the film, Claire (Najarra Townsend) becomes obsessed with one of her clients after she is asked to do her hair for her wedding. Claire is unhinged, but the film also wants you to sympathize with her. This leads to probably my number one issue with the film. Most horror movie tend to frame the killer in one of two different lights: one is the psychotic killer that kills just because; the other is the person driven to kill because of bullying, bad life circumstances, etc. De Palma’s Carrie is a great example of the person driven to kill because in the film, she is treated so poorly that by the end the audience is actually rooting for her or at least feeling that her actions are somewhat justified.
The problem with The Stylist is that it wants to have its cake and eat it too. Claire is a psycho that kills for joy, but you should also feel sorry for her? I don’t think it lands very well and it makes the movie more messy that it needs to be. What did you think, Andrew?
Andrew: Yeah, I completely agree with you about the killer’s motivation being an issue in this movie. Most of the film is tapped into a strong sense of emotional realism, observing the awkward dynamics of new female friendships and allowing the audience to feel the loneliness and social anxiety of the main character. But when she all of a sudden snaps into psycho killer mode and starts killing people...I just don’t buy it? That seems like a strange critique of a horror movie about a serial killer, but something about the killer’s motive is left too open-ended for my liking. Does she kill out of a sense of body envy, as the ritual of wearing other people’s hair suggests, or as a release valve for her social alienation, or what? I just don’t understand her desire to kill, and the obliqueness is a major stumbling block for my enjoyment of the narrative here.
What does work, however, is basically everything else. There’s something very perceptive about the film’s basic setup, which imagines the life of a hairstylist as a potentially lonely one. Although she’s the protagonist of this film, she’s a tertiary character in the life of all her clients, only valuable insofar as the services she offers and the emotional labor she expels in making pleasant chitchat and offering impromptu therapy sessions. And the film is gorgeous to look at, and even the murder and ritual scenes are draped in all the beauty and grace of a perfume ad, with director Jill Gevargizian utliizing slow motion, many overlapping dissolves, and sleek, elegant lighting throughout. The music goes a long way, too, to give the movie a sense of grace and pathos – as does the performance of the lead actress Najarra Townsend, who shines here in a way that reminded me of Samantha Robinson’s starmaking turn in The Love Witch. And I totally agree with you, Jessica, in seeing the ending as delightfully deranged. I just wish there wasn’t this massive logical hole in the film’s narrative foundation that makes several plot points feel forced or contrived, undermining the goodwill that The Stylist generates with almost every other facet of its artful construction.
Pieces (1982) by Juan Piquer Simón
Jessica: Oooooof. I think I started rolling my eyes about like 10 minutes into this film. I should probably preface with I DON’T think I’m a fan of B-movie slasher films. There are lots of cheesy lines, gore, naked women, etc. The thing is that it all kind of gets old in this movie fast. None of the characters are very memorable. It isn’t like Slumber Party Massacre, where we stay with a specific group of teenagers. Instead, the killer is just cutting up random girls at a prep school. The thing that could make this movie redeemable is comedy, but it wasn’t even funny. Also, you know I’m going to have to point out the super racist appearance by a Bruce Lee impersonator / ”Kung Fu professor” that just drops a chop suey line and leaves....I know this was made in 1983 but GOOD GRIEF. Andrew, what do you think about Pieces?
Andrew: I was hoping you would call out the “Kung Fu professor,” which also got a big yikes from me – as did pretty much everything else in Pieces, to be honest. I imagine that this is the kind of film that Ebert had in mind when he used the term “dead teenager movies” so flippantly to dismiss slashers – young female characters are introduced only to be ogled at and chopped up in fairly rapid succession. There’s something obviously insidious about the fact that female victims tend to be at least partially naked when they’re murderously penetrated via sharp objects, but its such par for the course for a movie like this that it almost feels cliche to even dwell upon. There’s a “final girl” character here of sorts, but only insofar as the girls are even allowed to be characters in the first place. It’s not like the boys are very charismatic either, but at least they have lines – my favorite of which is the one where an authority figure denies that there have been any deaths of disappearances at the school and that everything’s fine, which hits different as a teacher in the COVID era.
Adding to this problem of characterization is the fact that the acting is...not good, with almost everyone involved delivering dialogue either a bit too enthusiastically or in slow, arhythmic speech patterns that suggest they don’t quite have their lines down yet. This might be a selling point for some viewers, who are into the B-movie vibes that this movie is giving off, but I’m with you, Jessica – it’s not a schtick that appeals to me.
The one somewhat interesting element here is that Pieces feels much more in touch with its giallo roots than most slashers, with a protracted detective plot and a mysterious gloved (and hatted!) killer who skulks in the shadows, obscured in sometimes amusing ways (like as an unrealistically dark silhouette in the window of a fully-lit room). As has been my track record with most giallo, though, I found the pacing practically nonexistent, as the film just leapfrogs from kill to kill with dead-end detective work filling in the yawning gaps between.
There is an interesting thematic point made at the very end when it is revealed that the killer is the school’s dean – and that he also takes advantage of his position in much more recognizably abusive ways – but for me, this is too little, too late. I would recommend both the 1974 and 2019 versions of Black Christmas as better versions of this, as those movies both explore violence against women in school settings much more thoughtfully and also have the added bonus of having an actual story with actual characters instead of just the greased gears that Pieces tries to crank into a movie. Still, this is exactly the kind of movie one imagines watching at a drive-in well after midnight, ideally too distracted by one’s date to pay much attention.
From Hospital Dumpster Divers
WTF Short Film Block
[Editor’s Note: In the spirit of full disclosure, it is worth pointing out here that Jessica starred in a short that played in a different short film block (“Tennessee Terrors”), which won the KHFF award for Funniest Short. If you’d like to watch that short – which is titled Crones Haulin’ Bones – you can do so here.]
Jessica: Perhaps the best way for me to cover the WTF short film block is by listing each short and giving a quick line or two about what I thought so here we go:
Inflatio – This short begins with a man being kidnapped and chained (Saw-style) and then the kid he used to bully farts in his face. So, farts….this short is about farts.
Sackhead – A man sees a guy with a sack on his head pointing to the shed. He goes in the shed and becomes a sackhead also. Ehhhh, at least it was over quick.
Guest – A scary figure stares at a girl and makes her hurt herself. This one was pretty scary, but only because of the momo-esque mask. I closed my eyes for most of it soooooooooooooo
Karaoke Night – I loved the styling of this short where a woman sings at a karaoke bar. However, it was too intense for me. In the short, a guy harasses the woman and at the end, she gets her alien friend to rape him to get revenge. Big yikes from me. [Editor’s note: rape is feminist when it happens to men, I guess? Seems legit.]
Mushi – Stylistically, I thought Mushi looked great. It was shot in black and white. I loved the animated sequences in the film. However, miss me with the body horror stuff because I could not watch it. LOL. The woman in the film has a snot tube string hanging out of her nose and she keeps pulling at it until she finds a parasite on the other end. Reminded me a lot of Junji Ito’s work, but was too horrific for me.
Hospital Dumpster Divers – This short was way too long. It’s about a guy who cleans hospitals and finds a disgusting gooey baby with syringes in its head??? IDK. It was trying to be funny and seriously scary and I don’t know that it pulled off either of those.
Snake Dick – So, this film ultimately is doing the same thing that Karaoke Night was doing but wayyyy more tastefully in my opinion. It opens with two girls at a gas station. Men try to harass them until the girl pulls out a flute, plays it and then her friend has a snake come out from between her legs. The snake kills the guy and the audience cheers. Not bad.
The Devil’s Asshole – A woman dressed as a witch wants to make the ultimate chili for the LGBTQ Chili and Breakdance Competition. She reaches for spicy seasoning and gets a spice called, "The Devil's Asshole." After pouring it in the chili, the devil himself comes to say hello and he is really obsessed with assholes for some reason. This short was simply made, but really funny. I enjoyed the writing and thought it was clever. I liked it so much that I retold the entire short to several people. LOL.
Cursed Granny – Thank GOD for this short. I needed some comic relief after watching the previous 7 films. This had some real Taika Waititi vibes. The script was funny, sweet, and cleverly written. I love that the theme in the film was about seeing your loved one age and how that can be related to horror themes like possession, becoming a zombie etc. I would 100% watch this as a full-length feature.
Return of the Living Dead
Demons
Return of the Living Dead (1985) by Dan O’Bannon // Demons (1985) by Lamberto Bava
Andrew: I’ll group together the next two films in the lineup – Return of the Living Dead and Demons – as they were introduced by programmer William Mahaffey as “the most badass punk rock zombie double feature of all time,” and the connection makes sense: both films were released in the same year, are both celebrating their 35th anniversaries this year, and both center on zombie outbreaks in enclosed spaces with a metafictional bent and a random group of punk characters who bring with them a quintessential 80s hard rock soundtrack.
Two years ago, Cinematary’s Nadine Smith used Return of the Living Dead as a springboard for a collaborative essay series called “Re: Fear” that explored the oft-unacknowledged and expansive potential of horror sequels and remakes, and in the first few minutes of Return, I could see exactly why. Loosely connected to Romero’s Night of the Living Dead franchise on the production side, Dan O’Bannon’s Return of the Living Dead exists in a universe where Romero’s first movie exists as a movie, and two characters, working in a laboratory/morgue, have an early conversation about what Romero got wrong (or, rather, was forced to change) about the verifiable reality of zombification. This conversation expands the boundaries of what’s possible within such a well-canonized subgenre, and later plot developments carry forward this guiding ethos. These zombies aren’t killed by headshots, burning them only makes the infection spread, and in some advanced cases, they can even talk.
Dan O’Bannon was the writer of Alien (a strong contender for my favorite film of all time), and this film shares the xenomorphs propensity for constant change and evolution. There’s no true protagonist here, as the focus of the film is ever shifting and the goalposts never stop moving until the whole thing is punctuated with a blunt, violent period that triples down on Night of the Living Dead’s sociopolitically tragic final note. One major downside to Return’s fluctuating structure, however, is a serious issue with pacing. Once the film reaches a certain level of chaos past the halfway point, things begin to feel monotonous without a central character or relationship to latch onto. It’s a 90-minute film that, to me, feels much longer.
Demons could be said to have a similar problem, as its even less character-driven than Return, but something about its energy and style transcend the need for narrative focus. Written and produced by Dario Argento and directed by Lamberto Bava (son of Mario Bava), Demons shares this effervescent quality with the best films of these Italian masters.
In this film, a group of couples and strangers are mysteriously invited to a secret screening at a cathedralesque theater. The film they are subjected to is a zombie film that feels completely cliché – until the zombification process begins happening to the audience members, one by one, until they all find they are locked in together. It’s a beautifully chaotic, bloody mess, oozing with great practical effects and a pulsating prog-rock score.
There’s not a ton to say about Demons – other than it rules – but something about it has always felt evocative to me, accidentally or no. If the film can be said to be about anything, it’s maybe about the relationship between films and their audiences, and could be viewed in the context of the age-old debate about whether or not violent films encourage violence in the real world. There’s a beautiful shot about halfway through Demons in which a violent image is projected onto the theater screen while a zombie convulses against the screen from the opposite side, ultimately tearing through to being wreaking havoc on the audiences themselves. I think about this image all the time as a perfect crystallization of the way media images, whether we want them to or not, force their way into our lives. For the flip-side of this idea, I’d recommend Tsai Ming-liang’s Goodbye, Dragon Inn, which also observes the way audiences watch films in an infinitely more meditative and life-affirming way. That film, like Demons, also just got a restoration, too!
Of course, this perhaps-accidental subtext regarding media influence in Demons won’t be the takeaway for most of its viewers – the screen bursting apart is a small moment. The majority of the film is dedicated to building suspense and ramping up raw energy, and it has plenty of that to spare. Just wait for the scene where somebody drives a motorcycle into the theater while wielding a katana.
This zombie-double-feature was followed up with Grizzly II: Revenge, which served as a reprise of Grizzly from last year’s KHFF “Girdler-thon.” Based on my, uh, non-appreciation of the original film last year, I figured it would be safe to skip that one and spare any Grizzly-heads from having their fun spoiled by me this time around.
Possessor (2020) by Brandon Cronenberg
Andrew: This year’s KHFF was capped off with the release of Brandon Cronenberg’s Possessor, which is currently still playing at Central Cinema in a limited-seating capacity. I was able to catch this one prior to the fest with Jessica, who wrote a full Cinematary review on it, so I’ll mostly let her review speak for itself, but I echo all the effusive praise she clearly articulates there. Possessor is easily the best horror film of the year, and was surely one of the highlights of the weekend for those able to catch it.
Possessor is as gruesome and unflinching as its advertising suggests, but never deploys violence sadistically for cheap thrills. Brandon Cronenberg has obviously put a lot of thought into which violent acts to show and which to leave just out of frame, and always finds a way to make each violent action as impactful as possible, even when the act in question is a movie cliché as common as a stab with a butcher knife. This well-considered bodily violence is also offset by even more disturbing sequences of out-of-body surrealism that are stunning in their craftsmanship, obviously made by hand and with extreme technical ingenuity that is essentially unmatched by the standard indie-horror fare of the last several years. And, as Jessica points out in her review, all this intensity is in service of a thought-provoking and compelling narrative about corporate surveillance and human autonomy under late-capitalism every bit as disturbing as the lizard-brain body horror stuff. I was a bit skeptical going into this one, but Brandon Cronenberg is the real deal.