Fright night is LADIES’ NIGHT at last
Toronto director sees a need for new perspectives as all-female horror anthology film premieres to cheers at Sundance Film Festival
PARK CITY, UTAH— Most people would say the main purpose of a horror film is to scare the bejeebers out of us. Not the women behind XX, the first all-female horror anthology, which had its world premiere early Monday at the Sundance Film Festival. They see fright films as a form of empowerment and advancement.
“It was created in direct response to the lack of opportunities for women in film, particularly in the horror genre,” Toronto writer/director Jovanka Vuckovic told a packed and cheering audience at the Library Theatre, which braved a very dark and snow-stormy night to attend the midnight screening.
“We’re very, very happy that you’re all here to share this historic moment with us . . . I think that the horror genre is badly in need of new perspectives and women have that to offer in spades.”
The films had three rules, said Vuckovic, who is also one of the producers of XX: they had to be written by women, directed by women and star women in key roles.
Vuckovic, an award-winning filmmaker whose first short The Captured Bird was executive produced by horrormeister Guillermo del Toro, wrote and directed The Box, the first of the four mini-terrors, each about 20 minutes long, bundled in XX. The anthology is scheduled for a Feb. 17 theatrical release.
Filmed in Toronto, The Box begins aboard a crowded TTC train where a frazzled mother (Natalie Brown) is taking her two young children, a son and a daughter, home for supper after an exhausting day of fun. They sit next to an odd little man holding a large present, brightly wrapped in red paper, who offers a peek inside to the curious son. What happens next needs to be seen, not described, but it’s not out of place to mention that a scene from Night of the Living Dead will pop up on the family’s TV screen later that night.
The other shorts are The Birthday Party by Annie Clark, alias the pop star known as St. Vincent, making her directorial debut; Don’t Fall by Roxanne Benjamin, who made her directing debut with the maledominated 2015 horror anthology Southbound; and Her Only Living Son by Karyn Kusama, whose groundbreaking female boxing film Girlfight won the 2000 director’s prize at Sundance.
The four films are connected by a wonderfully sinister animated sequence involving a creepy doll, directed by Sofia Carrillo, who has obviously seen a Tim Burton film or two, and who really qualifies as the fifth director of this anthology.
“I think what we’re trying to do is show that (horror) is not all just that one thing that people have the image of,” Benjamin said. “It’s many things. It’s that sense of creeping dread, it’s building tension, unease.”
Is there something about the XX shorts that makes them particularly female?
Only, perhaps, in that three of the four films involve a mother or maternal figure attempting to shield children from advancing terror.
As with male-directed horror films, there’s no shortage of blood, gore, screams, jump scares and things that go bump in the night.
The four films within XX are all strikingly original, with the exception of Kusama’s Her Only Living Son, which borrows a little too freely from Rosemary’s Baby.
Kusama was the only one of the XX directors not present at the screening. She skipped Sundance so she could participate in the Women’s March on Washington over the weekend to protest the new administration of U.S. President Donald Trump.
She sent a note, read to the audi- ence, about how she views Trump’s rise as a form of evil that horror films can help exorcise.
“I think we’re seeing very clearly that there is indeed evil in the world and I’m happy that the four of us have a chance to interpret, give voice to and resist some of that evil.”
Call Me by Your Name triumphs: Sundance audiences and critics alike are swooning over Luca Guadagnino’s Call Me by Your Name, a coming-of-age drama which had its world premiere here Sunday evening.
Adapted from André Aciman’s 1980s-set novel of a young man’s sexual awakening, it stars Armie Hammer as a visiting American scholar staying for the summer in northern Italy, in the family abode of a teenager played by newcomer Timothée Chalamet.
A relationship begins, very slowly, allowing viewers to drink in the intoxicating sights, sounds and moods of Guadagnino’s exquisite film.
Recalling Blue Is the Warmest Color and the current Oscar likely Moonlight, the film is a rich arthouse experience that may well cross over to the mainstream. I’ll have more to say about it later.