Torture? I don't even know her!
Revisiting a little-seen South Korean cult classic, the Winnipeg Film Group celebrates 50 amazing years, Lady Gaga teams up with Tim Burton, and are you suffering from disc rot? These are the Sunday Scaries!
To die——to really be dead——that must be glorious.
~ Dracula (1931)
Hello and welcome back to Sunday Scaries. Long weekends are the best, short weeks are the worst. Also, the wasps are out! Cover your patio drinks with extra coasters and your patio meals with your entire body. Works for me.
Who’s Getting Probed This Time?
Last night our local cinema club (me, Willow, Mike, and Trevor, with a brief guest appearance from my husband Chris) gathered round the old big-screen, fired up the all-region DVD player, and watched the Korean cult classic Save the Green Planet (2003, Jang Joon-hwan). However, we discovered about 20 minutes in that the film was corrupted with disc rot in a very visible band around both the movie disc and the special features disc. As my strange luck would have it, I mistakenly bought two copies all those years ago, and the discs in the second set were perfectly fine, crisis averted. Check your discs, physical media pals.
No surprise, we chose to watch Save the Green Planet in anticipation of the upcoming film Bugonia, directed by Yorgos Lanthimos and featuring Emma Stone in the now gender-swapped role of a high-powered CEO abducted by wing-nut conspiracists, in what is said to be a ‘faithful’ remake. I am fixated on the word ‘faithful’ because, well, much as I love Save the Green Planet, a significant part of the film is spent watching the CEO be tortured by his captors in a variety of grotesque and unpleasant ways. How faithful can it be? You’re a brave woman, Emma! Aside from, or maybe because of, its gruesome slapstick violence and wild shifts in pace and tone, punctuated with various renditions of Somewhere Over the Rainbow, we greatly enjoyed the film and hope the remake will lead to an updated Blu-Ray or 4K release of the original. If anyone can navigate this material it’s Lanthimos, but it does leave me wondering what’s next: Calvaire, the Musical?
I hate leaving you with recommendations for movies you can’t actually see, so I encourage you to check out three other underseen Korean horror films: The Medium (2021, Banjong Pisanthanakun, a South Korean/Thai co-production), now on Shudder; Sleep (2023, You Jae-Sun, for rent on Apple TV); I Saw the Devil (2010, Kim Jee-Woon, also for rent on Apple TV).
Also of note: The Winnipeg Film Group is celebrating 50 years with a week-long film festival September 23 to 28. I wish I could be there! In among all the excellent programming is a night of early WFG short films programmed by Joanne Jackson Johnson — including Ed Ackerman’s 1980 plasticine-animated film Sarah’s Dream, for which I wrote the dialogue at the tender age of 17 (after the picture edit was completed, which made for a challenging task). I can also be seen in the companion film Live Studio Sound, which shows the live single-take recording of the Sarah’s Dream soundtrack where I get to cluck like a chicken and roll a skateboard around the studio floor. Winnipeggers, go and enjoy!
Currently watching: The aforementioned all-region DVD player arrived just this past Friday, so I will now be going through all my neglected Region 2 and 3 discs with great delight. Next up: the crisp chilly Norwegian slasher Cold Prey (2006, Roar Uthaug).
Cool Story, Dude: This week I came across the haunting Up in the Hills, She Dreams of Her Daughter Deep in the Ground by Karlo Yeager Rodriguez (Strange Horizons, 2023) and now you have as well.
This Week in Horror: Julian Singleton has posted part two of his J-Horror After J-Horror YouTube series, a most welcome development. If you missed it, part one is here.
Observant Instagram followers will note that I’ve changed my username to @david.a.demchuk after a thoughtful Bluesky discussion of the discomfort that some in the Black horror community have expressed with the dated but still painful slurs ‘spook’ and ‘spooky’ (highlight to view) and their pervasiveness in the days and weeks leading up to Halloween. If these are words that are commonly part of your horror vocabulary, I encourage you to be considerate with how and where you use them, if you continue to use them at all.
And finally, this week saw the release of the Tim Burton-directed video for Lady Gaga’s catchy and creepy new song The Dead Dance (which I gather is somehow associated with the Netflix series Wednesday). Gaga fans are having a good year.
That’s it for today. Until next time, remember: the truth is out there.
Help me. Help me be human.
~ The Fly (1986)