This Year’s Brooklyn Horror Film Festival Brings the Scares
Chad Collins
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If it’s Halloween, it must be time for the Brooklyn Horror Film Festival. One of the year’s best genre festivals is just days away. From October 12 through October 19, the Brooklyn Horror Film Festival will be gracing the East Coast with an electric (and eclectic) array of genre cinema, from oft-forgotten gems to world premieres. Screenings will take place at Nitehawk Cinema Williamsburg and Nitehawk Cinema Prospect Park, and individual tickets are on sale now here. As with any film festival, there’s a lot to catch at this year’s event, so here, we’ll be highlighting some of the best offerings you won’t want to miss.
Breathing In
Jaco Bouwer (Gaia) returns with his next feature, an adaptation of a South African play of the same name. A wounded soldier arrives at the home of a woman and her young daughter during the midst of the Second Anglo-Boer War, only to find something deeply sinister occurring among the women. A chamber piece with supernatural undertones, Breathing In looks like it will chill you to your core.
Staff Picks
There isn’t a single weak link among the sundry staff picks screening at this year’s Brooklyn Horror Film Festival, so I’m going to list them and let the titles themselves do all the talking. Among the options are: Angst, Door, Maniac Cop, Messiah of Evil, Ringu, Torso, and Teinosuke Kinugasa’s 1926 classic A Page of Madness with a live score from The Flushing Remonstrance. This year’s festival is spotlighting Japanese horror cinema, though with the staff picks, they’re served with a side of Giallo terror and some home invasion thrills as dessert. Couldn’t be more perfect.
The Sacrifice Game
Jenn Wexler’s (The Ranger) The Sacrifice Game is home invasion horror just in time for Christmas. Supernatural forces trap two young girls and their teacher over the holiday break with a demon sure to send the trio spiraling. It’s one of my most anticipated features of the year, especially as someone who’s been eagerly anticipating what Wexler would do next. I can’t think of a better Closing Night Film than this one.
The J-Horror Virus
Sarah Appleton and Jasper Sharp’s The J-Horror Virus is part of Brooklyn Horror Film Festival’s larger slate of “Fear in Focus: Japan” offerings, and as one of several documentaries showing there, it’s arguably the one I’m most excited about. Spotlighting the likes of Hideo Nakata, Kiyoshi Kurosawa and Takashi Shimizu, The J-Horror Virus is a retrospective look at the distinct filmic language of J-horror, exploring its origins and visceral endurance felt in horror cinema to this day.
T Blockers
At just nineteen, Alice Maio Mackay’s third feature, T Blockers, is political body horror with a low-budget edge. Dangerous parasites take over the men in a small Australian town, and the queer community left standing must fight back, parallel with the real-life horror of queer existence. It’s tailor-made for me, and no doubt a stunning look at a burgeoning talent in the horror sphere.
Whether those are what you’re looking for or not, there’s plenty of great stuff showing at this year’s Brooklyn Horror Film Festival. SXSW sensation Satan Wants You will be showing, one of the strongest (and most chilling) genre documentaries of the year. The Adams Family’s critically acclaimed Where the Devil Roams is on the docket, too, as is Robert Morgan’s haunting Stop Motion. As noted above, you can view the full lineup (and purchase individual tickets) here.
Are you planning to attend this year’s Brooklyn Horror Film Festival? What are you most excited for? Let me know over on Twitter @Chadiscollins where I’m always down to talk both new releases and hidden gems.
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