Sean Parker
This week’s Soho Horror Festival Shockdown Saturdays theme was “Ghost in the Machine,” and as with every Soho Horror weekend so far, it was a fun pair of films to watch. The festival has now taken us to the woods, on the road, and sat us down to a good meal so, of course, we were achingly overdue to become paranoid by the devices we use every single day. The first feature this week, the Argentinian History of the Occult (Historia de lo Oculto), asked us to question the lens through which we view the world in surprising They Live fashion. As always, we were treated to introductory thematic shorts accompanying the feature.
First up, Teething tells the story of little baby Bethany, a colicky newborn baby, whose teething is causing her hospital nurse (Ayesha Mansur Gonsalves) to slowly lose her mind. Attempting to confide in the hospital janitor (Hugh Thompson) about her near disturbing desire to be rid of the child, the janitor instead opts for isolation and noninvolvement until profound, heart-sinking horror sets in. Glen Matthews has made a bold and effective horror narrative with his short Teething. I certainly yelled a couple of WTFs at the screen, and the ending near stopped my heart, which is not an easy thing to do. I had to stay through the shock of what I thought I was seeing in order to make it through to the end. I’m glad I did because this review may have gone a different way had I not. Teething is shocking, surprising, and well-structured storytelling.
The follow-up short, Rear Window is nothing like the Hitchcockian film of the same name. Preying on the fears of self-isolation and people’s passionate beliefs in conspiracy theories, the film supplies a Lovecraftian horror climate change scenario for one lonely pescatarian. It’s a bit silly, but writer/director/star Maxim Beliayev’s choice to film in black and white appeals to the short’s creature feature nature and serves as a great precursor to our upcoming black and white feature. The final frames of the film are intense as we finally see what’s outside one man’s Rear Window.
This weekend’s first feature, History of the Occult, is going to be hard for me to talk about without giving too much away because of how precise and well-done it is. Writer/director Christian Ponce has crafted a Fritz Lang and Carol Reed style noir using paranoid media horror elements, drawing inspiration from John Carpenter’s They Live, where the effect of powerful influence and propaganda is reflected through media. Ponce also utilizes components of David Cronenberg’s Videodrome, where the characters must question their reality based on a television program.
The film outright tells its audience this is a scandal of Woodward and Bernstein proportions by placing posters of All the President’s Men casually behind a journalist in one of the first scenes. This detail also provides a presumption to the audience as to when exactly History of the Occult is supposed to take place, and the fact the movie is filmed in a 4:3 aspect ratio and in black and white helps.
The film opens on a mystery as a night watchman (Victor Díaz) witnesses the vanishing of a man right before his eyes. Hovering over an unidentified dead man, the man kneels in a symbol-etched circle but loses a journal during his disappearing act, providing the watchman with the only tangible evidence that the event ever occurred. Almost a year later, the watchman has died and the producers for the country’s biggest news program, 60 Minutes Before Midnight have inherited the book and attempt to reveal its secrets, secrets that may include the involvement of the country’s President.
“60 Minutes before Midnight” has lost all of its sponsors and prepares to air one final show to bring the truth to light over this matter. At the end of the broadcast, if everything goes according to the producers’ plan, politician Adrián Marcato (Germán Baudino) will be able to confirm the Argentinian president’s involvement and the producers will have to provide police with their collected evidence. So how does this political thriller become a horror picture? Marcato confesses that he, and many people in power, are actually a coven of warlocks altering people’s perception of reality, changing the details of their memories, and even making them forget their children.
For the viewer, the revelation plays like a trick, maybe some kind of feeble attempt to keep the news show going by changing its format into some kind of tabloid news show, but then the producers start to experience strange occurrences. In one of the best sequences of the film, the color red starts to creep into the otherwise black and white picture as a journalist begins scratching at the surface. It’s a subtle nod to the importance of journalism in exposing the truth, but it also has a lot to do with the fabric of the characters’ current world.
The way that History of the Occult presents itself in an almost real-time format as the television program takes its final bow was a real nerve-wracking way to set up the tension. As the clock winds down on the final hour, strange things begin happening on and off the screen. The closer the show gets to the truth, the harder those in power try to stop it. This conversion of propaganda as horror is a wondrous effort by Cristian Ponce and one that reliably works to connect the true-life horror of the country’s 1976 coup d’état and subsequent abduction by the government of many activists, workers, journalists, and others from their homes and workplaces. Ponce turns history into horror and makes an amazing work of art out of it.
I love a lot of horror coming out of Latin and South America these days, and with films like History of the Occult, it’s pretty easy to see why. There are a lot of wonderful voices in horror finally able to reach wider audiences, which is a lot of the reason I enjoy attending these festivals, as well.
Though Shockdown Saturdays are now officially half over, the fun will continue throughout March. Plus, there are many fun interactive events to be a part of like next week’s “I Spit on Your Grades” podcast taping or the virtual Murder Mystery Zoom Party happening in two weeks. If you’d like to be a part of the festival, all you have to do is become a member of the festival’s Facebook page and click the links in the announcements section when the films are released on Saturday. All showings are based on local time in Soho, England—check with their website and Facebook page for times (often they leave the links open until Sunday at midnight). The festival is free, but Soho Horror Film Festival is operating solely on viewer support donations and entirely without sponsors. So, if you like what you see, I’d strongly encourage you to support them so we can all indulge in future events.
