‘The Harbinger’
Stream it on Tubi.
A friend recently showed me some photos from a party I went to in the ’90s; in one I am laughing with another friend and his friend. Yet, despite the evidence, I have no memory of the boyfriend. Could this stranger have been the victim of a demon that wiped him and my memory of him? That’s the macabre premise of this unnerving, haunting and elegantly directed film from writer-director Andy Mitton.
Monique (Gabby Beans) goes to stay with and care for an old friend, Mavis (Emily Davis), who says she suffers from nightmares when she’s awake and is a living nightmare during the day, one we all remember: the Covid lockdown. When Monique starts having similar scary dreams, she and Mavis consult a demonologist who tells them that the towering creature they see – wearing the long-beaked mask of a plague doctor – loves the pandemic, because isolation is his way of getting into people’s minds and making them disappear. And they are next.
Mitton’s film is a gripping tale of loneliness and fear disguised as a ‘Nightmare on Elm Street’ style film about a lurking contagion and a deadly entity. Mitton limits his settings and trusts Beans and Davis, two magnetic stage actresses from New York, to do their job, and the result is a naturalistic scary movie that delivers the creeps much more effectively than a more unhinged interpretation of the material. Man, the ending broke my heart.
At a gas station in the middle of nowhere in New Mexico, Jessica (Ashley Denise Robinson) runs into her old friend Elena (Callie Hernandez), who lives in a trailer after being involved in a terrible car accident. When Jessica reveals she fled California to avoid a stalker – a former classmate named Kevin (Will Madden) – Elena offers her a place to stay. But then Kevin shows up looking like death, and Elena realizes that only she and her dumb friend Benny (Andy Faulkner) can make Kevin disappear.
I hope director-editor-cameraman Pete Ohs doesn’t mind my putting his film in a horror column. Because while directing this demented and funny cautionary tale about bad men, trauma, and zombies – quintessential horror stuff – he really made an unclassifiable genre hopper with a fierce feminist heart. His cast gives wonderfully understated performances that fit nicely with a script, written by Ohs and his actors, that tackles grief and guilt with deadpan humor and a subversive understanding of the afterlife. It’s an eccentric delight.
‘Para Betina Pengikut Iblis’
Stream it on Netflix.
Sumi (Mawar Eva de Jongh) is a teenager who lives in rural Indonesia and dreams of city life. Instead, she has nightmares in which she is visited by a pasty-headed demon (Adipati Daggers) standing by a lake with arms outstretched. In addition, the town doctor chopped off her villainous father’s infected leg, and it is now in the freezer, even though her father wants her to bury it to lift the family’s curse. Then the demon actually appears and convinces Sumi to chop off a piece of the leg and serve it to her father in a Sweeney Todd style curry.
I’ll stop there, because if that description makes your nerves tingle – and that’s just the first 20 minutes of the film – I highly recommend watching this breakneck terror story by Rako Prijanto. It’s best to have a fortified constitution: the movie is chock-full of slaughterhouses, supernatural folk-horror, copious beheadings, and even an exploitation-style urban idiot. Though the story loses momentum as it nears the finish line, unable to clearly work out what the madness means, the journey towards it is paved with gross chaos. It ends with the promise of a sequel, and I’m done for seconds.
‘lyla’
Stream it on Tubi.
What we have here is a “Shining”-esque setup with Lynchian aspirations: 28 years after Hugh (Clark Moore) witnessed his mother fatally slit her neck, he and his wife, Lyla (Jolene Andersen), and their young son, Lars (Mason Wells), head to a secluded lakeside cabin where Hugh hopes to work on his long-running book. Along the way, Hugh keeps meeting people who say they know him, but is stunned.
As Hugh and Lyla bicker endlessly in the cabin, his writing suffers and he spirals, kills a visitor and wanders through the collapse of time and space. Or something. When the cabin gardener said, “It’s easy to lose yourself here,” I thought, “Here too, friend.”
I recommend this sordid psychological thriller because, impenetrably enigmatic as it turned out, writer-director Gordon Cowie is a gifted cinematographer with a visual style that’s eerie and eye-catching, like when he turns a fogged-up phone booth into an underworld portal of sorts. Cowie has a great partner in Andrés Acosta, whose score of fat static fluttering thumps and brooding slow strings makes the film sound as darkly enchanting as it looks.
‘Etheria Movie Night 2023’
Stream it on Shudder.
The 10-year-old Etheria Film Festival is dedicated to the screening of female-directed genre films. This year’s edition of the annual short film anthology is an entertaining mix of mostly horror short films from 10 directors.
My favorite is “Go to Bed Raymond” by Nikki Taylor Roberts, a sinister little gem about a boy who keeps waking his parents in the middle of the night to tell them that “the bad kids that live in the woods” are in his room, and they’re mad. It’s seven minutes of fast-paced terror, with a wonderfully deadpan performance from Adam Blackstone Jr. as the creepy boy from the title.
Other Highlights: “No Overnight Parking,” Meg Swertlow’s gory, dark comedy starring Alyssa Milano as a woman who encounters an attacker in a parking lot; ‘Sucker’, Alix Austin’s feature film about sisters attacked by a life-sucking leech; and “The Erl King,” Genevieve Kertesz’s folk-horror fairy tale about a girl who discovers that even the magical forest is home to clean-shaven acorns.
