Every November for the past 7 years, the horror faithful have descended upon Aberystwyth for the growing horror film festival that is Abertoir. Originally a three day festival, it has since spread out to a sprawling six, offering up an eclectic mix of films alongside various talks, guest Q&As, theatre performances, quizzes and the occasional appropriately ghoulish live band. Located in the Arts Centre on the university campus, the setup is very simple, with one theatre, one bar upstairs, and a handful of food bars and canteens dotted about nearby. It’s Peter Cushing’s centenary, so the bar is serving Cushing dark ale and bright green Cushing cocktails all week.
Anything that fits the horror genre is on the cards, from ancient silents to spanking-new premieres, so long as it’s interesting. Each event is introduced by endlessly cheery organiser Gaz, and everyone gets to rate each film afterwards, with the results published each day in a leaflet. In short, you’re made to feel involved. The organisers are welcoming and the atmosphere unpretentious, and I quickly fall into a blissful rhythm of consuming film after film in between discussing all things horror over endless beers.
The first film I manage to catch is stylish crime horror Discopath, in which a young man in 70s New York is driven to brutal acts of murder whenever he is exposed to the evil that is disco music. There are some inventive touches throughout- one victim is dispatched beneath a disco dance floor and left staring lifelessly up at the jiving dancers above, others end up hacked to bits with shards of a broken seven-inch. The pacing is uneven though, and the comedic touches can be pretty jarring against the backdrop of decidedly nasty graphic violence. Still, it’s a well made and interesting take on the traditional slasher, especially if you fucking hate disco.
All Cheerleaders Die is next, and it’s something of a mixed bag. Set, unsurprisingly, in an American high school, it starts off as a straightforward revenge flick before quickly shifting gears into tongue-in-cheek supernatural territory, whereby a car-load of cheerleaders at the bottom of a river are reanimated by a young witch and her magic stones. Nihilistic and funny, it offers a pleasingly sardonic demolition of american teen culture, but it essentially boils down to a fairly standard teen black comedy with elements of The Craft and Heathers.
Midnight approaches, and we’re on firmer ground with Lucio Fulci’s classic City of the Living Dead. A priest opens the gates of hell by hanging himself, and a psychic together with a journalist must race to close them as the dead start to rise from their graves. With its teleporting undead priest, brain-squishing zombies and a powerfully atmospheric synth score by Fabio Frizzi, I feel that I’ve finally arrived. It’s a crudely made film in many ways; choppily edited with a plot that hangs together only loosely, but this only bolsters the film’s psychotic feel, whereby hideous, shambling apparitions are always lurking on the periphery of reality. Weaved into this Lovecraftian atmosphere are scenes of intense grotesquery and brutal violence; a storm of maggots; brains scooped from craniums; a woman in the grip of supernatural terror vomiting out her own entrails; and most memorably of all a scene in which a giant, whirring drillbit is slowly and unflinchingly forced through somebody’s skull. City is thick with zombie B-movie charm, but beneath this the film has a powerful psychological impact, being both intensely visceral and unnervingly inexplicable.
DAY TWO starts with Madhouse, a seventies murder mystery that sees Peter Cushing and Vincent Price together onscreen. Price plays a faded star who is coerced into revisiting his most famous part, that of the ghoulish Doctor Death, but he fears that doing so will make the murders start again… Both actors send themselves up in this affectionate and knowing homage; Cushing plays up his Hammer career by appearing in cheap Dracula makeup at a party and Price nostalgically watches old (genuine) film clips from his career as he struggles with his evil alter ego. He even gets interviewed by Parkinson at one point. The script is crap, but Price and Cushing turn up gold, and the film is a hokey delight with some surprisingly bloody scenes for a film of its kind.
The Italian-made Across The River is a ponderous beast, beautifully shot but sadly rather empty. It concerns a naturalist in the remote mountains who comes across something strange in the ruins of an abandoned Italian village. It’s part found footage, with wildlife nightcams strapped to trees and to a fox, but in the main it’s made up of long, lingering shots of forest landscapes and abandoned houses. It looks great, and there’s a subtle use of sound and silence throughout. Despite a solid lead and excellent photography though the story slowly grinds to a halt, and much of the built-up creepiness just ebbs away. The payoff was neither powerful nor interesting enough to justify the wait for me, and it would likely have worked better as a solid short than as an overly drawn-out full length.
Spanish film Painless (aka Insensibles) however is something quite special. The ambitous plot concerns a group of children in 40’s Spain who are unable to feel pain, leading to their perpetual incarceration in an ancient fortress turned sanitarium. Their only hope of salvation arrives with a Jewish doctor fleeing from Nazi Germany, who recognises that their rehabilitation lies in their being taught what pain is, even though they will never feel it themselves. Meanwhile in the modern day, a doctor discovers he has terminal cancer, and his only hope lies with a bone marrow transplant from a close relative. His search leads him to go digging around in the past, into the horrors of the Civil war thought left buried forever. It’s testament to the quality of the film that the two complex intertwining narratives never get confusing, making for an engaging and darkly philosophical gem.
The Station is essentially a rather silly Austrian take on The Thing, and quite agreeable it is too. A group of scientists living in a remote research post in the Alps discover beneath the melting ice long-dormant organisms that merge the biology of their hosts to create nightmarish hybrids. The lead character is a bearded, Macready-like figure who lives in his own separate shack, drinks too much, and generally scares the crap out of everybody else. The organisms spread, and trust within the camp quickly disintegrates as a rather inventive mix of abominations stalk the landscape. It’s largely played for laughs, but whilst it’s great fun, it never quite reached the high watermark that I had hoped it might. Still, it’s impossible to be really down on a film in which an old woman attacks a giant Mosquito-Ibex with an ice core drill.
http://www.avenoctum.com/2014/01/abertoir-horror-festival-aberystwyth-wales-nov-2013-part-2/
Erich Zann
https://www.facebook.com/abertoir
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