When it comes to movies at the Cannes film festival, away from the worthy official screenings things are horrifying. Quite literally.
This year has seen a surge in titles promising brain-eating, blood-splattering and nightmare-inducing action in that section of the market where hundreds of movies are on sale.
The offerings are a far cry — or is it a scream? — from the aesthetic line-up vying for the festival’s top prize, the Palme d’Or, with many revelling in schlock movie-making.
George Romero, the director of 1968’s Night of the Living Dead, was leading the gruesome pack in Cannes by presenting a teaser for the third sequel in his zombie series, Land of the Dead, starring Dennis Hopper and Asia Argento, due out in the United States next month.
Riding on its exposed entrails was the unrelated Return of the Living Dead: Necropolis, and bashing down the door were a host of other features designed to send a shiver up audiences’ spines.
Among them: Kaw, an overt homage to Hitchcock’s The Birds; Dead Meat (tag line: ”It’s not what you eat, it’s who you eat”); Boy Eats Girl and Spirit Trap, which keeps the standard plot of disposable teens trapped by malicious entities.
Then there are: Swarmed, yet another insects-on-the-rampage flick in the vein of 1970s B-graders; Zombie Island, which sounds like a TV reality show but is not; Alien Apocalypse (nothing to do with the celebrated Ridley Scott outing); Man With the Screaming Brain; and Puppet Master vs Demonic Toys.
The conclusion to be drawn is that there is big money in chills.
Or in being forced to take the pop-referencing ironic comic route because the film’s budget does not stretch to believable special effects.
”The market for horror films is huge today,” said Loris Curci, a sales manager for Minerva Pictures, whose blood-soaked slate includes HP Lovecraft: The Terror Within and Hell’s Fever.
”They keep selling because you can’t show them on TV, because of age restrictions and such. The kids love them,” he said.
Midnight Movies: From the Margin to the Mainstream, a documentary on landmark disturbing films from the late 1960s and the 1970s, shown at Cannes on Friday, argued that market forces have now replaced social anxieties as the driving force for goo-and-guts features.
Decades ago, we were ”afraid science and nukes will get us, women will be 50 feet tall, and, boy, will we be in trouble then,” Romero said in the film, which looked at his first movie, John Waters’s Pink Flamingos and Richard O’Brien’s The Rocky Horror Picture Show, among others.
But Lloyd Kaufman, president of Troma Entertainment (home to such Z-grade gems as The Toxic Avenger, Poultrygeist and Terror Firmer), said he believed America was still driving the horror trend — but not in a good way.
For all the energy devoted to such products, though, there was little chance of their creators ever making the grade in Cannes’ more elite, arty sections — or even aspiring to.
After all, for the masters of gore, the only good red carpet is one soaked in blood. ‒ Sapa-AFP