Dispatches From The Brooklyn Horror Film Festival: Five Movies To Watch Out For

Truly a neighbourhood film festival, the Brooklyn Horror Film Festival takes place at independent cinemas, bars, and venues all over Brooklyn. The majority of films screen at the Nitehawk Cinema, one of many cinema businesses going all-out with in-theatre food and beverage service; other screenings take place at the IFP Made In NY Media Centre, the Wythe Hotel's underground screening room, or the popular Videology bar, among others. And that doesn't even include the numerous sites selected for after-parties and the like.This means that a visiting guest, such as myself, gets to visit a wider sample of the area than if it were in a single location. The variety of venues – and venue types – paints a flattering picture of Brooklyn's cinema scene, full of people overcoming limited resources with sheer passion.The flip side of that, of course, is that a scattered array of venues makes scheduling difficult. Travel times must be factored into one's plans, and given Brooklyn's less-than-ideal subway coverage, that can rule out certain combinations of films entirely. What's more, every film plays exactly once, which further complicates things. Two movies you want to see playing at the same time? Tough, no second chances for you. Out of 45-plus sessions on the schedule, it's only realistically (or at least, reliably) possible to attend around a dozen. Scheduling festivals is difficult, and must take into account venue restrictions, distributors' wishes, and more. But film festival attendees often want to see a bunch of movies, and that just isn't possible at Brooklyn Horror in its current incarnation. The festival's still in its early years, though; perhaps once Nitehawk's larger second venue opens, a more achievable schedule can be arranged.The key thing, though, is that BHFF's organisers and staff truly believe in what they're doing, and managed to put together a pretty strong slate of horror films and events for the city. Many of the films had played other significant genre festivals – Fantasia, Fantastic Fest, SXSW, FrightFest, Sitges – but none had played locally, and as a distinctly local festival, that's what counts.Those films – like the exquisitely-crafted 16mm possession movie Luz, the supremely kinky would-be murder thriller Piercing, and the surreal and nightmarish camgirl psychological horror (and audience award-winner) Cam – have received plenty of column inches around the horror press. I want, instead, to highlight five films that brought something unique and unexpected to the proceedings.

Garth Marenghi's Darkplace co-creator Matthew Holness' feature directorial debut was one of my favourites of the lineup. Its unique tone differed from the rest of the programme as much as it does the hyper-comedic Darkplace: it's an extraordinarily grim and distressing psychological horror, with barely any dialogue, dealing with trauma in ways I'd not really seen before. Sean Harris (the baddie from the last two Missions: Impossible movies) won a Best Actor award for his haunted, haunting disgraced puppeteer turn, while Under The Shadow director of photography Kit Fraser took away the Best Cinematography award for his bleak compositions of decaying rural England. Getting under the skin through its performances, its singularly creepy puppet, and its tone of absolute hopeless despair, its horror is altogether unlike that of most films in the genre. There's not much story to this one, but it's got buckets of atmosphere; if you're anything like me, you'll shudder at the mere thought of it.

Winner of the Best Cinematography award in the festival's "Head Trip" section, comprised of films that fit the horror genre in unconventional ways, Isabella Eklöf's Holiday has no monsters, no ghosts, and very little bloodletting. Plot-wise, it's barely even a thriller, following young ingenue Sascha (Victoria Carmen Sonne) through a summer on the Turkish Riviera, where she lives in luxury as a gangster's trophy lover. Luxury, at least, on the surface, as Sasha's beau (on whom she is completely financially dependent) displays all the instability and brutality, sexual and otherwise, that his occupation would suggest. Despite the inclusion of a truly harrowing, numbly uneditorialised rape sequence, it's primarily a film about rape culture, both in terms of brutal male privilege and socially conditioned subservience. It's a movie where the bad guys don't get their comeuppance, and where a character set up to be a "white knight" turns out to be just as bad as the man in the black hat. In many ways, Holiday makes for an intriguing counterpart to Coralie Fargeat's similarly-themed Revenge. But where that film has its protagonist claim vengeance in a satisfyingly bloody fashion, Holiday's ending, upholding and even bolstering the status quo, is far more unsettling, and in a way, more horrifyingly realistic. Holiday might not be a conventional horror film, but Eklöf's final composition – with Sascha symbolically posed as the masthead on her abuser's yacht – is one of the most chilling of the year.