Every year, Sydney, Australia plays ghoulish host to A Night of Horror. It’s called “A Night of Horror,” but it’s really more like a week or so, because “A Week or So of Horror” is about as wieldy as a lead hatchet. A festival of frights gorging itself on a diet of sinister submissions from local and international filmmakers, it’s the only one of its kind in Australia and has become such an institution it now lays claim to the odd premiere or two.

This year’s event was made particularly conspicuous by the world debuts of Seve Schelenz’ SKEW, Jason Stoddard’s THE AFFLICTED, Scott Leberecht’s MIDNIGHT SON and Jorje Krippe’s #12. Whilst these were the shows many came to see, it was frequently the wildcards sulking in the shadows of independent production that stole gasps of amazed fear and/or loathing from the chests of tipsy audiences (the Dendy Newtown, which frequently serves as venue for the festival, encourages patrons to quaff house wine heartily throughout). Only the most striking—be it for all the wrong or right reasons; sometimes it’d hard to tell the difference—of this year’s slithering cinematic hopefuls are accounted for here. But be assured: it was a night (week) that left many a horror-buff tingly with glee.

DESCENDENTS: This Chilean film looks enjoyable enough if overly familiar. The world has succumbed to an airborne contagion that instantly transforms the living into murderous white-eyed facsimiles of themselves, and any survivors now cower under the reactionist yoke of a fearful, militant government. Where its path diverges from the standard postapocalyptic zombie thing is that director Jorge Olguín (of Fango Video’s SANGRE ETERNA fame) speeds up evolution a little (a lot) and introduces the concept of children who are immune to the virus, having been born with gills and vaguely inferred dreams of the ocean. I say “vaguely” because DESCENDENTS culminates in the most bizarre, left-field conclusion of any of the films on display (and the most vertigo-triggering camerawork). It’s so bizarre it teeters on the brink of the deus ex machina pit but doesn’t quite fall in, owing to the fact that a very, very loose effort is made throughout to signal the ultimate arrival of a gigantic, Apache-crushing octopus that will deliver us all. Hideously odd and unrepentantly amateur, DESCENDENTS must be seen to be disbelieved.

HYBRID 3D: You’d be forgiven for walking into HYBRID, which stars Shannon Beckner, Oded Fehr and Ryan Kennedy, expecting a mass of motorized parody and little else—it is all about a morphing car that eats people whole, after all. Said murderous automobile eventually parks its evil self inside the locked confines of a night-staffed garage where the bumbling grease-monkeys are tasked with combating its alluring (but deadly) Ferrari-to-Hummer ways. Make little to no mistake, the whole thing is ridiculous – but it’s not the premise itself that casts a veil of joyous vacuity over proceedings, it’s the fact that director Eric Valette (MALEFIQUE, ONE MISSED CALL remake) attempts to force such a silly concept to work on a serious level. When one character—the younger, educated one, often scolded for bettering himself on the job via huge textbooks—comes up with the theory that the killer car may in fact by the modern evolution of a type of squid able to disguise itself as convenient places for scared fish to hide before gobbling them all up, you know you’re watching one of those. Come for the hills of loosely-strung string-cheese, stay for the mountains of increasingly self-conscious one-liners: “That’s not how you hunt a Bengal tiger!”

THE LAST LOVECRAFT: RELIC OF CTHULHU: As far as comedic horrorthons go, THE LAST LOVECRAFT is loads better than the similarly-inclined SHAUN OF THE DEAD (oh, put your pitchforks and torches and flaming pitchforks away), but presents itself in a manner more akin to THE HANGOVER with a loving disrespect for icky Lovecraftian tropes. I say “disrespect” because, if you’re at all precious about the father of modern horror’s contributions to the art, you will be suitably horrified by the many endearing riffs on the man’s undersea mythos that director Henry Saine fills this parodic wonderland with. It’s all in the aid of a fantastically funny film, of course, and the message is clear: THE LAST LOVECRAFT is great stuff, but it’s also very amusing when the lenses of fans and nonfans alike blur in a kaleidoscope of surreality brutally invading reality. Cthulhu is preparing to rise again, and to do so he, she, or it (most likely “it”) requires the delivery of the titular artifact, of which only the last living descendent of H.P. Lovecraft—Jeff, an underwhelmed office worker—can prevent. It is every bit as deliciously farcical as it sounds, and highlights include but are not limited to a fishman kept barely alive by a maniacal sea captain in a squeaky, sploshing kiddy-pool out the back of his desert Winnebago. See this.

THE AFFLICTED: Before we begin, it’s worth noting the resonant short film that preceded THE AFFLICTED, a 25-minute monotone exploration of human desperation and depravity entitled THE BURIAL PARTY by director Joseph Dodge. Masterfully shot, abstract and genuinely tense, it’s what happens when you stick the most hopeless of men in front of a tribunal of impossibly wealthy miscreants prepared to reward him with a briefcase of minor riches (but major to him) provided he can survive three rounds of Russian roulette for their—at times sexual—edification. Only sociopaths will make it through this without cringing on the protagonist’s behalf at least a dozen times

Right, so: THE AFFLICTED. Allegedly based on a true story (of which the Internet at large seems to have no recollection of), Maggie (Leslie Easterbrook) is a visibly unhinged mother of four living in the redneck backwoods whose knowing husband (Kane Hodder, a.k.a. Jason) kick-starts the real lunacy of the piece when he’s caught sneaking out in the middle of the night. Her solution to this sudden emotional battery is to batter him back with a convenient aluminum baseball bat until he is very dead, and thus begins an ever-increasing montage of the abuse she lavishes on her terrified brood. She regularly defends her actions—which range from a sickening force-feeding to corralling her underage daughters into prostitution to, eventually, savage deaths all ‘round—with the shield of religious zeal, an insanity compounded and oddly reinforced by the courtship of Hank, “The Cowboy Prophet.” THE AFFLICTED regularly implies more than it details, which makes for a provocative and uncomfortably sincere examination of a matriarch gone mad without anyone really noticing until it’s all a bit too late. A testament to Jason Stoddard’s far-reaching thematic exposition, the one question you’ll have by THE AFFLICTED’s fatalistic finale is: Why didn’t anybody notice?

Shorts Program #4: Crazy Mofos: An unashamed slew of all things shy of an half an hour and purposely shocking, Crazy Mofos was easily the festival’s most striking shorts program. It opened with Michael Panduro’s utterly revolting music video for Colorado tech-metal band Cephalic Carnage’s OHRWURM, a psychosexual mosaic of two bodies vigorously intertwining until there is naught but gore and maggots and exploding phalluses. Elsewhere RECOLLECTION impressed with its satisfying if predictable “hero-is-really-the-killer-oh-no” nuance, THE LEGEND OF BEAVER DAM prompted gigantic laughs with a very clever Tenacious D-meets-killer-in-the-woods musical mania fright-farce, and TO MY MOTHER AND FATHER quite literally ripped the appeal out of motherhood (sick-bags at the ready). The silver medal goes to the UK production of RED BALLOON, which did awful psychological things to a hapless babysitter, and the gold medal? Gregor Erier’s ST. CHRISTOPHOROUS: ROADKILL. The German closer ran for 26 minutes, but it wasn’t nearly long enough, with an abrupt ending the only qualm any of us had with this tale of the longest, bloodiest night in a super-unlucky student’s life.

MIDNIGHT SON: If the worrying mainstream embrace of TWILIGHT has neutered your interest in the once-great niche appeal of the vampire flick, MIDNIGHT SON will change all that in just over an hour. Scott Leberecht’s casting of Zak Kilberg as his lead—troubled introvert Jacob—is particularly indicative that, while this is foremost a great film, it’s also a reaction: MIDNIGHT SON was supposed to the next book in the TWILIGHT series before its release was foiled when an early draft leaked onto the Internet, and Kilberg looks an awful lot like Robert Pattinson…except less stupid, his acting unaffected by baseless hype. The same cannot be said for blooming love-interest and existential opposite Mary (played by Maya Parish), who’s just about as far away from Kristen Stewart’s Valium-eyed indifference as you can get. In between hawking raver wares on street-corners and nurturing a prevalent drug habit, she pursues an awkward relationship with our Jacob (they manage to not have sex at least three times). Jacob, for his part, can only meet her once the sun goes down. He suffers from a rare sun-adverse skin disease, or so he believes until he slowly realizes the only thing that will sate his hunger pains is human blood. MIDNIGHT SON is such a slow-burning film that, if you approach it completely unaware of the subject matter as I did, it’ll take you some time to even notice you’re watching a vampire movie. To live on the blood of one’s enemies here is to eke out a miserable, limited existence. There is almost no romanticizing to be found; Jacob is not superstrong, nor irresistibly deadly, nor even particularly capable; he is a young man stricken with an affliction that renders him unfit to cope with modern-day living, an affliction passed to others with as little as a modest gnawing of their skin. Ironically, these grim, realist semantics of vampirism end up being much more affecting than any thinly veiled Mormon allegory for abstinence could ever be.

ABSENTIA: A world premiere to crow about. Director Mike Flanagan’s ABSENTIA saw closing night sell a whole lot of tickets, and for good reason: this is one hell of an independent horror film. In the grand tradition of budget a la PARANORMAL ACTIVITY punching well above their budget’s weight, Flanagan’s 91 minutes of creeping, largely unseen dread take a big leaf out of the J-horror handbook and terrify by suggestion, not sudden scares. There is a monster at the heart of ABSENTIA, but it’s, well, absent—which, as the story rolls on, only serves to make it even more unsettling. At most, you’ll hear its chittering and see its spindly fingers rolling possessively over the shoulder of one of its helpless captives—those helpless captives being the nucleus of why you’re so disturbed in the first place. Tricia’s husband has been missing for seven years without explanation, and she’s mere days away from being able to declare him “in absentia”—which is to say, legally dead. Just as she puts pen to official document, he reappears…kind of. With her recovering addict sister Callie seemingly more interested in investigating the strangeness at the heart of things than Tricia is, all evidence starts to point toward the dank under-bridge tunnel at the end of their street. And guess what? You’re going in there. Mind you don’t trip over any lost souls.

That’s a wrap. To find out about future editions of the A Night of Horror festival, go here.

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MOVIES/TV - Fearful Features