It's in the seas! It's coming!
Phantoms in the fog, babies washed ashore, one-eyed gulls with attitude, and 111,000 spiders in the dark. This must be the Sunday Scaries!
To die——to really be dead——that must be glorious.
~ Dracula (1931)
Welcome back for another round of Sunday Scaries. This week’s edition is going to be a little shorter as there’s a lot going on around town this week, including Fogfest, our much-loved local horror film festival which features screenings of short films and feature films, a weekend of industry workshops and assorted acts of East Coast derangement. This year’s feature screenings include the new Adams family film Mother of Flies, a schlocktastic remake of the Roger Corman cult classic Deathstalker, locally produced liminal thriller Hangsashore, and a 25th anniversary screening of everyone’s favourite teenage werewolf movie Ginger Snaps.
Just because you can’t be here with us, it doesn’t mean you can’t have a little East Coast film festival of your own! Here’s a suitably eerie little list to choose from:
The Strings: The perfect post-midnight mid-November watch. A lesbian singer/songwriter retreats to her aunt’s remote cottage in the dead of winter to work on some new music, make forlorn phone calls and watch youtube videos on string theory while something slowly (very slowly) moves towards her. Proof that all horror is subjective, as I think this film is as close to perfect as it gets. (A less impressed friend called it ‘The Idiot Strings’ and, well, she’s dead now.) If you think you will hate it, you probably will. If not, you might love it the way that I do.
The King Tide: A dark and brooding seaside fairy tale, gorgeous in that forbidding way, about remote fishing village driven mad when a baby with mystical powers washes ashore. Takes a little while to get where it’s going, as is the custom nowadays, but it absolutely gets there. That old adage that says cracks are how the light get in? Doesn’t apply here: lots of cracks, not one speck of light. Many thanks to Isla!
The Lighthouse: Robert Eggers’s wildly eccentric 2019 film is also one of his best. Two men who either love or can’t stand each other (Robert Pattinson and Willem Dafoe, both superb), are trapped in a lighthouse tormented by their work, each other, their aching horniness, a demented one-eyed seagull, a vision of a mermaid and, of course, secrets from the past. Is it a horror movie? It sure scares me! Occasionally puzzling and frustrating but certainly never boring.
My Bloody Valentine: An unpretentious Canadian classic from 1981 that effectively conjoins folk horror and old-school slasher within a vividly drawn working-class milieu: a remote East Coast mining town with a tragic history and an upcoming Valentine’s Day dance. The various townspeople (played by Cynthia Dale, Don Francks, Patricia Hamilton, Neil Affleck and many more) are so thoughtfully and lovingly sketched that it’s a shame to lose them, but lose them we do, so graphically that only recently has some of the uncut footage been restored.
Treevenge: Christmas trees have had enough of your bullshit! A classic of its own kind, this 2008 horror comedy, just 16 minutes long, is the killer-tree movie you’ve always dreamed of. Also: amazingly gratuitously gory! If you’ve never seen it, and even if you have, ‘tis the season!
Bluenose Ghosts: Many Canadian children were treated to this faintly creepy 1973 Nova Scotia travelogue, written and directed by Martin Alford and featuring a number of the finest East Coast theatre actors of the era, rounding up ten of Helen Creighton’s collected regional folktales. A staple of school classrooms and CBC weekend afternoons throughout the 1970s.
Currently watching playing: Celebrity Traitors UK wound up with a terrific final episode and a smashing result, leaving me with a gap in my recreational schedule which I am filling with…a video game! I have started the smart, salty and funny superhero workplace comedy game Dispatch, about a disgraced crusader who gets put to work in the front office while raising the cash required to repair and upgrade his mecha suit. Wonderfully animated, episodic gameplay, stacked voice cast, set your own level of interactivity, hugely enjoyable.
Cool story, bro: It is awards consideration season, which means a lot of the best genre writing from the past year is popping up for free online for those who want to read, recommend and vote. This week’s free-to-read treat is Thomas Ha’s novellette Uncertain Sons, an exceptional sci-fi/fairy-tale/western/horror hybrid by a master storyteller and the title piece from his recent collection from Undertow Publications.
This week in horror: Somerset tomb collapse exposes underground crypt from the 1700s. World’s biggest spiderweb discovered inside 'Sulfur Cave' with 111,000 arachnids living in pitch black.‘All’s Fair’ logs biggest Hulu Originals scripted debut in three years (and the worst reviews maybe ever). Truly an embarrassment of riches.
And that’s it for this week. Until next time, just remember: "From cocktails to cock rings all in one 24-hour period — God, I love my job."
Help me. Help me be human.
~ The Fly (1986)