Dead by Dawn: Scotland’s only Horror Festival

A life-long horror fan and yet a horror festival virgin, I was eager to have my petals plucked at Dead by Dawn last Saturday. In place of the yearly three-day event in April, organiser Adèle Hartley held a one-off Un-Hallowe’en Special at the Edinburgh Filmhouse, cramming 20 films into 16 hours. screenWORKS was fortunate enough to be afforded a press pass, but due to a very late request, I bought my own ticket just to be safe. I decided that the best thing to do with the spare was to convince a resolved horrorphobe to accompany me to the festival, on the grounds that a) the review would benefit from an outside perspective and an objective reading of the films from someone whose tastes lie out-with the genre, and b) I had no small animals on me to torture at the time. Reluctantly, she complied.

The festival opened with Bye Bye Sally, a short film directed by Paul Leyden, and starring Malin Akerman – best known for her role as Silk Spectre in Watchmen – as a deeply unhappy young woman seeking to end her life, who falls under the advances of an opportunistic suicide counsellor. It was well-conceived and enjoyable, yet darkly humorous though it was, I found it to be an odd choice to open a horror festival, as it was not what I would term ‘horror’ in the classic sense of the word (Reluctant Companion actually enjoyed it; things were not boding well). I found that as the day went on, my idea of horror would be refreshingly challenged, as Dead by Dawn seeks to showcase all manner of films which can lay some claim to the genre.

The ‘dark humour’ of Bye Bye Sally was a recurrent theme throughout the day. Horror and comedy make for natural bedfellows, and at no point is this more obvious than when watching either of them in a packed theatre. Perhaps it is because they are the only genres in which the audience will express its emotions aloud – either through laughter or screams – that they have the ability to make cinema feel like an almost participatory event. Here was an environment which celebrated the marriage of the two, and a film which encapsulated that union brilliantly is Paul Komadina’s The Director’s Cut: the first feature of the day. One of the film’s stars, Mollie King, was in attendance to introduce the film – an Australian slasher-comedy, which follows the grizzly fate of a stranded film crew at the hands (paws?) of a psycho in a koala costume. Daft as it was, there were enough scares to keep Reluctant Companion suitably ill at ease, and some truly nasty moments: look out for a conceited starlet being given a slightly more thorough shower than she might like, and the mercy-killing of a wounded rabbit having unfortunate repercussions for the well-meaning executor. It also has one of the best uses of the cinematic ‘bend’ technique since Jaws. It can be a tricky genre to pull off (if horror is bad we can at least laugh; if horror-comedy is bad, what then?) but The Director’s Cut does so with gusto, and was a great way to start the day.

The first selection of short films was themed ‘Horror Shorts with Happy(ish) Endings’ and by and large that is what they were: for the most part occupying that same strange hinterland as Bye Bye Sally; films underscored by darkness, but which might not be immediately recognisable as horror. Highlights included Pedro Pires’ Danse Macabre, a balletic piece following the final twists and contortions of a lifeless body as it is prepared for funeral, and The Pool, which follows a breath-holding contest gone wrong for three teenage boys, directed by Thomas Hefferson, who was in attendance. Meredith Ann Berg’s Void wins prize for biggest scare, albeit down to a technical error: a problem with the audio plunged the theatre into a deafening white noise, just as Reluctant Companion was beginning to settle into some form of ease. The stand-out film for both of us though (and judging from the reaction of the rest of the crowd, everyone else) was Brendan and Jason’s Butler’s Tufty, a heart-wrenching glimpse into where teddy bears come from. For anyone who has one from childhood they are still particularly fond of, be warned: you may never look at it in the same way again.

I have to admit, I spent the majority of the second feature waiting for that ‘Blair Witch moment’, when the faux documentary film reveals itself to be a hoax. With Cropsey, that moment never comes. Despite an eerily familiar story, and characters who seem too real to be real, this is a bona fide true-crime documentary which oozes creepiness throughout.  Filmmakers Barabara Brancaccio and Joshua Zeman shine a light on the darker part of their childhoods and indeed, of all of our collective childhoods, drawing upon the myth of the bogeyman; the child-murderer, who in this case, it appears, may not have been a myth after all. Examining the case of Andre Rand, a potentially innocent man jailed on purely circumstantial evidence for the deaths and unresolved kidnappings of a series of mentally handicapped children in the Staten Island area of New York throughout the ‘80s, Cropsey is a study in urban legend, and the ways in which it has permeated a region for decades. At the centre of the story is the archetypal haunted house we all explored as children: the dilapidated Willowbrook Mental Hospital, Rand’s former place of work, where even now, it is rumoured that former mental patients roam the woods and underground tunnels that lie below. As unsettling as the film is, nothing that Brancaccio and Zeman capture is as harrowing as the footage taken from Giraldo Riviera’s exposé of the then still operational Willowbrook in the ‘70s; the image of its neglected inhabitants subsisting in filth and chaos is not one I will soon forget. But then, there is very little about Cropsey that is forgettable; the highlight of the festival for me and as good as any documentary I saw at this year’s EIFF.

The second short film selection, themed ‘It Can Always Get Worse’ was certainly more ‘horror’ in the traditional sense. Good news for me, bad news for Reluctant Companion, whose distaste for cinematic depictions of demonic possession means that she is forced to stare at the ground for the entirety of Stephanie Lapointe’s Jardin Dead End; which is a shame, because it was easily the funniest film of the day – a play on just how much men are prepared to tolerate for sex. Hatch by Damian McCarthy is Ireland’s answer to Eraserhead, and Eric Scherbarth’s Sinkhole drew the biggest scream from the crowd. Hartley remarked at the start of the day that if she thought the audience would come with her, she would dedicate the festival entirely to short films, and from the selection she chose to screen, one can see the attraction. It offers such variety as a format: a film like Excision by Richard Bates Jr, about an alienated teenager with a penchant for surgery, could very easily be elaborated into a feature; the way in which it draws you in and then ends after 18 minutes feels almost like a teaser. Conversely, Scooter Corkle’s Chloe and Attie is such a subtly invoked story, boiling down two whole lives into just 9 minutes, that another second added to its run-time would be completely superfluous. It would take me just about 100 words to describe the complex story which the film relates without even a line of dialogue.

The final two features which followed were equally diverse. 5150 Rue des Ormes by Éric Tessier is an accomplished psychological thriller following the plight of film student, Yannick as he is kidnapped by ‘righteous’ taxi driver, Jacques: a man on a quest to punish the wicked. This is a French-Canadian film, one of many which were screened throughout the day, and although I had read of a boom in French-Canadian filmmaking, it was nice to see such glowing confirmation of an industry in rude health. The film culminates with possibly the most magnificent game of chess committed to celluloid since The Seventh Seal. In Bruce Dickson’s Red Velvet which followed, we see actor Henry Thomas, better known as Elliot from E.T. grown up, grown wise and grown weird, in a film which is part homage to ’80s slasher movies, part post-modern mind-melt. In Dickson’s directorial debut, about a troubled writer constructing stories of a bunny-eared, ski-mask wearing psycho-killer, he is channelling horror maestro Dario Argento, by way of New Queer Cinema’s Gregg Araki. The results are both vibrant and visceral.

This would have been a great way to cap off the day’s proceedings, but a surprise movie has been added to the bill. Before announcing what it is, Hartley throws some free DVDs into the crowd, almost bursting the nose of the guy behind me, but protesting that it isn’t a horror festival until blood has been spilt. Then, with no further ado, we are treated to The Book of Zombie, possibly the first (and last) Mormon zombie movie to grace a cinema screen near you. It’s exactly the type of film that you might find in the bargain bin of your local supermarket, and if you do, there are worse ways you could spend two quid. Unlike the majority of low-budget fare, here you won’t find the usual bog-standard, cheap-as-chips CGI, but old-school make-up and effects, actually quite reminiscent of The Evil Dead. The gore is fantastic, laughs abound, and a clever punch-line tops the film off nicely at the end.  As the credits roll and Dead by Dawn draws to a close, I quietly pray for a sequel. Reluctant Companion quietly prays for death. A good time was had by all.

John Gibb