It’s a sunny afternoon when I’m unexpectedly invited to plunge into darkness with Brandon Cronenberg. He’s a first time filmmaker (and with that name you can guess his heritage) about to debut his feature at the Cannes Film Festival to an inevitable mix of fame, glitz, support, and snobbery. The movie is ANTIVIRAL, a vicious little cyanide pill of celebrity satire and body horror set in a not-so-distant future society where fans n’ sycophants pay to be infected by a disease from their favorite celebrity. The familial influence on the material is obvious, but we’ll spare Brandon further discussion of that, if only because it will probably be the focus of everything else written about him this year. The one similarity worth noting is that like his father, he’s a pretty quiet and unassuming guy, which runs counterpoint to his decidedly sick and twisted imagination. Thank god, because I only need to get a certain amount of creepy out of a single interview and I’d prefer to get that from the film rather than the filmmaker.

Living in Los Angeles can be scary, but especially so for Suziey (Suziey Block), the heroine of ENTRANCE. In theaters and available nationwide today on IFC Midnight Cable VOD and digital outlets (SundanceNOW, iTunes, Amazon Streaming, XBOX Zune, PlayStation Unlimited), this quiet chiller was directed, co-scripted and co-produced by Dallas Hallam and Patrick Horvath, who discussed its creation with Fango.

[In honor of this weekend's extra sensory experience, BEYOND THE BLACK RAINBOW, Fango asked director of the excellent, trippy explorations of identity I CAN SEE YOU and THE VIEWER, and Glass Eye Pix sound design extraordinaire (you've heard his eerie work in the likes of THE HOUSE OF THE DEVIL, STAKE LAND and THE INNKEEPERS), Graham Reznick to give us his favorite pieces of mind bending cinematic psychedelia.]

From monster kid to GODZILLA costume builder, to working on such Charles Band/EMPIRE classics as ELIMINATORS and GHOULIES, special FX wizard Cleve Hall is fascinating (as even casual viewers of his hit show MONSTER MAN can now attest too). Hall has see and done it all. Hell, he even built Gene Simmons’s iconic chest armor. In light of his current run on Syfy, Fango sat down with the artist to talk up his career and all it's entailed.

Filmmaker Yam Laranas is a one-man horror band, operating out of his native Philippines, where he writes, directs, produces, shoots and edits his eerie films. His 2004 ghost story SIGAW was part of the Asian horror invasion and attracted the attention of Vertigo Entertainment (RING, DARK WATER, THE GRUDGE), which hired Laranas to remake his own film with an American cast as THE ECHO in 2008. Laranas returned to his country to helm his latest film, THE ROAD (no relation to the same-named 2009 postapocalyptic film), which Freestyle Releasing opens in 16 American cities this Friday and simultaneously debuts on Freestyle Digital Media (to find the film in your area, go here, and read Fango’s review here).

Achieving high production value on a shoestring budget is always a challenge, but then throw in space stations, spaceship interiors and multiple gore FX and you are flirting with a PLAN 9 disaster, right? I say, “bring it on.” This was the challenge presented when Municipal Waste’s Tony Foresta pitched me the cannibalistic space voyage that was the bands latest single “The Fatal Feast.” This was an opportunity I couldn’t pass; and so on a tiny budget, an epic bloodbath would be born.

As any independent filmmaker sweating-and-fretting their way through 2012 knows all too well, the present channels for distributing their product can be a deceitful morass of bald lies, lopsided profit splits and an overall disintegrating DVD market. Despite industry experts touting online streaming and On Demand pay-per-view as the business model of the future, there is another option available to creators who’ve already managed to gain some level of note or notoriety: The travelling theatrical roadshow.