There are a many reasons why Frightfest is a joy to attend, but chief among them is the chance to watch films with an appreciative, knowledgeable and attentive audience of like-minded horror fans. This struck me most during Saturday night’s screening of Dario Argento’s Giallo (2009), a blisteringly bad addition to the Italian director’s ignoble recent run of duds, when, roughly thirty minutes into the running time, the audience seemed communally to begin to delight in all of its awfulness. In different environs, say at a poorly-attended multiplex showing or a home viewing on DVD, the film would easily be written-off as one of the most poorly-executed thrillers ever made, yet somehow this mass realization allowed the audience positively to revel in its terribleness, rendering it one of the most enjoyable screenings of the long weekend. A unique experience. Readers are advised to avoid the film at all costs, however.

The film of the weekend in terms of sheer quality was undoubtedly Michael Dougherty’s Trick ‘r Treat (2008), a wonderfully imaginative anthology of five stories set on Halloween night, all delicately woven together in the manner of Robert Altman’s Short Cuts (1993). Director Dougherty, a frequent collaborator with Bryan Singer, uses as his starting points different aspects of the traditional Halloween night and weaves them into a series of modern folkloric tales stuffed with viciously black humour, visual grace and storytelling invention, and the result is an absolute joy from start to finish. A genre classic which I defy anyone not to fall instantly head over heels in love with.

By way of comparison, also Halloween-themed and by far the worst film I had the misfortune of watching was Adam Gierasch’s remake of Night of the Demons (2009). The very antithesis of Dougherty’s film: a shallow, hugely unimaginative and derivative snoozefest, apparently swimming in the same sea of retarded sexuality as the songwriting members of Spinal Tap. The only entertainment I could find was in gawping at how, in the 18 years since Terminator 2 (1991), Edward Furlong has managed to metamorphose into K.D. Lang.

British films had a strong showing on the Monday night closing the festival, with two major world premieres. First up was Heartless (2009), the long-awaited new film from The Reflecting Skin (1990) director Philip Ridley; set recognizably in what David Cameron would have us believe is ‘Broken Britain’, the story is of a young man with a large heart-shaped birthmark on his face who is led into a pact with the devil to rid him of it and allow him to fall in love. The film is highly praise-worthy: imaginative ideas, genuine filmmaking flair and a unique, distinctly British feel to proceedings made it a rewarding watch, and festival organizer Alan Jones described it as his favourite film of the year. While I felt that it was not without its clunky moments, it is undeniably a bold piece of work from one of our cinematic national treasures, and for this reason, as well as for a fantastic cameo by Eddie Marsan, I recommend it.

The other major British release, and the one film I went into with most reservations about, was The Descent: Part 2. When it was announced that a sequel to Neil Marshall’s excellent caving shocker was in production my immediate reaction was that it would be pointless, and the double whammy of Marshall relinquishing the directorship as well as the tampering with the haunting ending of the original made me intensely wary of the project. After a worryingly shaky start, however, the sequel proves itself more than a match for its predecessor: taking the Aliens (1985) route of sending the sole survivor back down to locate her missing friends, the film successfully recreates the claustrophobia and character-driven tensions that marked out the original. This is in no small part down to the presence of director Jon Harris, editor and second unit on Marshall’s film, who not only creates a feeling of continuity between the films, but also imbues this one with some cleverly thought-out new ideas and an occasional skilful insertion of black comedy to proceedings. All-in-all a worthy sequel, one as good as a fan of the original could hope for.

Outside of the British and American films, as usual there was an array of interesting international films. The Miike Takashi award for most out-there film clearly would be handed to Dutch filmmaker Tom Six for his truly bizarre The Human Centipede (First Sequence) (2009). The synopsis tells pretty much all you need to know: a brilliant German surgeon who specialises in separating Siamese twins kidnaps and incarcerates three foreign tourists in the basement of his house with one intention: to graft them together anus-to-mouth to form the titular creation. The implications of such a creature are suitably explored, and though the film may be found to be lacking in a number of quarters, the sheer loopiness of the idea is enough to make it linger unpleasantly in the memory for quite some time.

A highlight for many attendees appeared to be the UK première of Swedish international hit Millennium: The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (2009), a more elegant if less descriptive title than the original Män som hatar kvinnor [Men who hate women]. The film, based on the posthumously-published bestseller by Stieg Larsson, is an effective twisty-turny thriller with two likeable, memorable lead characters and tears through its 150 minute duration surprisingly quickly. My reservation would be that there is simply too much typical thriller chaff – hunching over laptops, blowing up photographs, digging in archives – for it to be particularly memorable, but if it sticks to the rules then admittedly it does so particularly well. Already a massive hit all over Europe, the source book’s popularity should ensure crossover appeal when the film is released here in April.

One of the most anticipated films in this year’s line-up was Tommy Wirkola’s Død snø [Dead Snow] (2009) and, after something of an unpromising start, the film delivered enough humour, gore and grisly deaths that one would hope for come the eventual arrival of the promised flesh-eating Nazi zombies roaming around a snowbound Norwegian forest. By contrast, Australian thriller Coffin Rock (2009) was a disappointment: a good premise – involving an infertile couple and an increasingly deranged young stalker – as well as a suitably gritty visual aesthetic set up tension promisingly, but the over-the-top pantomime madness of the villain began quickly to annoy and alienate. Saturday night climaxed with the deliriously unhinged Black (2009), which began as a French heist film, but began dipping its toe into genres as diverse as Blaxploitation, camp sixties thrillers and – amazingly – sci-fi animorphism; audience members fading at the 2am start time were quickly shocked out of their slumbers.

A final word for Dread (2009), perhaps the most divisive film of the festival, which screened on the Sunday night. Based on a Clive Barker short story, it centres on three students who embark on a college project involving video interviews with their peers to investigate the nature of their deepest fears, but inevitably the subject of their investigations begins to turn towards themselves and their own revelations lead to predictably messy consequences. Moving at times at a glacial pace, the film seemed to lose viewers still pumped up from the din of Night of the Demons, but I found it to be an intriguing, unashamedly psychological thriller – not a classic by any means, but in tone reminiscent of Crash (1996)-period Cronenberg and with a satisfyingly bleak denouement. An original story, and one which deserves to find an audience.

The second film within two weeks to take the death of a child as its starting point, although Orphan would seem to have little in common with Von Trier’s Antichrist (2009). Or does it? The latter merged the uneasy bedfellows of Strindbergian chamber drama and occult horror to produce a fascinatingly obtuse whole, and Orphan appears to be trying to do something similar in its melding of family melodrama, thriller and recognisable bad-kid horror genre tropes. Yet the intriguing premises and a well-paced first act slowly dissolves into a jumbled mess in the hands of director Jaume Collet-Serra, though admittedly at times something of an enjoyably silly mess, and one whose merits make the film an oddly rewarding, if severely flawed, watch.

 

Kate and John Coleman are a well-to-do couple living in what seems to be a wintry suburban idyll with their two children, daughter Max and son Daniel. A pleasantly surprising wealth of characterisation in the film’s first act firmly establishes their individual personalities and the dynamic between them. Kate is a caring mother but with certain foibles, most notably a history of alcoholism and lingering emotional scars from a recent stillbirth (a creepy opening nightmare sequence makes this abundantly clear) while John has a history of philandering; their all-too-human flaws understandably result in a residual undercurrent of mutual mistrust between the two. Though close to Max, they are a little distant from the adolescent Daniel, who is just beginning to assert his own separate personality.

 

Presumably to help them with their grief, as well as overcome their marital difficulties, the couple have decided to adopt a child from the local orphanage, and on visiting are drawn to a bright, precocious, if eccentrically attired Russian girl named Esther. They immediately decide to take her into their family, but their new addition has some difficulty settling in: picked on by her new schoolmates for her strange clothes and withdrawn personality, and viewed with suspicion by Daniel who is perhaps jealous of the attention being foisted on the new arrival. Then, of course, strange happenings begin to occur: Esther exhibits a variety of odd behaviours, has a habit of being around when others are involved in ‘accidents’, and so too repeatedly shows up to interrupt her adoptive parents’ primal scene.

 

All of this is surprisingly well-handled by director Collet-Serra, whose ignoble oeuvre has so far consisted of previous duds House of Wax (2005) and Goal 2: Living the Dream (2007). Yes, there are problems: the glossiness of the visuals do at times make the film resemble more closely an advert for a high-spec saloon car, and at times the scare scenes are so clichéd and badly handled that they come across as being more for camp value rather than tone. But in building suspense through character, with some well-observed performances from the Coleman family members, and by marshalling a stately pace, he allows the film’s first half to build to a satisfying crescendo of tension.

 

Here, though, is where the problems begin to stack up. Having done most of the hard work in setting up believably flawed characters and a mysterious ambiguity around Esther, the film suddenly dives into exploitation, with the little monster scurrying around doing all sorts with bricks, hammers, vices and guns. While this does make for entertainingly schlocky viewing, it also has the effect of disjointing the narrative and the pacing, and from its intriguing, promising start the film slowly descends into well-trodden formulaic nonsense, with plot points carelessly thrown against the wall in the hope that some stick, and a rush to a helpfully expositionary phone call to Russia to explain things away before Esther’s big reveal. The sub-par slasher film denouement ultimately leaves the viewer feeling heavily short changed, and adds to the feeling of cheapness that a 123 minute film can ill afford.

 

What a shame, though, that the film ends up such a horrible mess, since there is much to recommend of it. The two adult leads, Vera Farmiga and Peter Sarsgaard, make for a believably dysfunctional couple, and their young children are also both fleshed out in terms of personality much more than one would expect for such a genre piece. Stealing the show, inevitably, is young Isabelle Fuhrman in the title role, whose initial radiance morphs into a beguilingly stony-faced monster who can well be believed to be either angelic victim or murderous manipulator. Director Collet-Serra clearly has ambitions higher than his previous studio vehicle output might suggest, and this goes some of the way to suggesting that there is an intelligence behind his camera, but Orphan‘s manifold flaws show that there is still much work to be done.