Currently in its 46th year of operation, the Sitges international film festival remains one of the world’s most prestigious cult/horror/fantasy film festivals. The festival has become synonymous with attracting high-end genre film talent, and packaging these into an extensive, multi-stranded event that is highly attractive to the academic researcher and the cult film reviewer alike. Indeed, in his introductory statement to the 2012 Sitges booklet, festival director Angel Sala argued for both intellectual and enthusiastic fan responses to some of the pressing issues facing film festivals and wider European cinema culture at the present time. 

Although Sitges is no stranger to controversy (both the event and Sala were briefly accused of screening ‘child porn’ after the 2010 premiere of Srdjan Spasojevic’s A Serbian Film before the charges were promptly dropped), it would be wrong to presume that horror and gore are the only pillars of the festival. In fact, Sitges’ enviable reputation affords it an impressive array of world/European premieres across a wide  range of genres that were structured through ‘Official Fantastic Competition’, ‘New Visions’, ‘Midnight X-Treme’, ‘Animation’, ‘Sitges Family’, ‘Casa-Asia’ and documentary (‘Brigadoon’) strands. 

With a wide and varied array of features and shorts in official competition, the festival often provides crowd pleasers from unexpected sources. For instance, Jake Schreier’s Robot & Frank (2011) is a heart-warming drama comedy that explores issues of nostalgia, memory and aging within a ‘soft’ sci-fi setting. The movie focuses on the emergent relationship between Frank (Frank Langella) and the robot that has been purchased to assist with his exposure to Alzheimer’s disease. Although initially resistant to this mechanical intrusion into his semi-ordered but otherwise desolate routine, Frank soon develops a very humanistic bond to his new companion, which comes to replace the diminished relations he has with a career driven son (James Marsden) and a freewheeling, globe-trotting daughter (Liv Tyler). Although purchased as an aid to elderly living, Frank unofficially re-programmes the robot to help him revive his former profession as a cat burglar, hoping that one last hit will help the pair with their retirement costs. This OAP criminal quest, as well as the gradual unfolding of Frank’s problematic relationship with a local librarian played by Susan Sarandon are sensitively handled by the narrative, and it was possible to detect many a sniffle in the seasoned horror audience, when the robot makes the ultimate sacrifice in the film’s finale to ensure that Frank evades punishment.   

While Robot & Frank is evidence of how a non-genre product can often find a new audience at Sitges, Lords of Salem is an example of a genre director using the festival to present a markedly new kind of product to his traditional horror demographic.

Bewitching the modern horror fan: Rob Zombie goes all supernatural with The Lords of Salem

The film is the latest release from splatter auteur Rob Zombie, whose previous releases such as The Devil’s Rejects (2005) as well as the two Halloween reboots (2007/2009) have confirmed his status as a modern white trash horror iconoclast. Other than the casting of regular collaborators such as Sheri Moon Zombie and Ken Foree, fans of Zombie’s existing output may well be hard-pressed to find many similarities in Lords of Salem, which does represent a distinct evolution in the director’s storytelling interests. The film focuses on Mrs Zombie’s key central lead character of Heidi, a hard rock DJ at a New England radio station. Having received a mysterious discordant recording from a group calling themselves The Lords, the DJ plays the track live on air, unleashing both violent flashbacks and a spree of wider contamination and chaos in the community. Although her boyfriend (Jeffrey Daniel Phillips) and boss (Ken Foree) at the station dismiss Heidi’s unease as symptoms of an unresolved drug addiction, her fate is revealed as being inexorably linked to the monstrous Margaret Morgan (Meg Foster) and her malevolent coven of witches that are tortured during a Salem witch trials pre-credit scene. These aged matriarchal characters are incarnated as Heidi’s sinister landlady Lacy Doyle (Judy Geeson), and her two lascivious sisters Megan (Patricia Quinn) and Sonny (Dee Wallace).  Having subsumed the heroine’s identity through perverse bouts of maternal mentoring, the trio prepare the unwitting protagonist for an unholy musical concert and ceremony that takes place at a local theatre in the film’s climatic scene. Several critics have noted Zombie’s latest effort to be a radical break with his hick orientated horror past, instead recalling a variety of supernatural horror classics such as Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby (1967). However, with its emphasis on the theme of a boarding house as a portal into alchemy, the film also recalls more controversial titles such Michael Winner’s The Sentinel (1977), which similarly overloads the screen with obscene and orgiastic imagery in its closing moments. Effectively realised, and with a brooding use of New England scenery, The Lords of Salem is certainly a brave move on Zombie’s part, but it remains to be seen if the project will continue to endear him to his natural cult fan base.        

POV shocks and the Cult of Celluloid Carnage 
While Rob Zombie’s latest release evidences a director moving away from the gross-out stable with which he is associated, Sitges 2012 also highlighted the extent to which extreme cinema tactics are increasingly travelling into the more mainstream titles showcased at the event. One such example is Franck Khalfoun’s graphic remake of the 1980 grindhouse classic Maniac. As part of the French creative trio that includes director/producer Alexandre Aja and screen-writer Grégory Levasseur, Khalfoun remains one of the few European horror filmmakers to have made the successful transition into the American genre market, contributing the parodic remake of Piranha (2010) amongst other titles. Although his directorial debut (the underrated, underground parking thriller P2 ([2007]) met with a mixed critical reception, Maniac confirms Khalfoun’s ability to compliment gore-led content with distinct stylistic flourish, in a narrative that actually surpasses the unnerving griminess of William Lustig’s controversial original. As with Lustig’s earlier and much censored notoriety, Khalfoun’s version of Maniac centres on the psychotic central lead character Frank Zito, whose defective relationship with his dead mother triggers a horrific campaign of stalking and scalping sexually active young women across New York. Although sticking closely to the thematic remit of the original, Khalfoun’s rendition offers a number of key performative and textual differences worthy of mention. Firstly, while Lustig’s version relied on the (literally) weighty presence of cult icon Joe Spinell in the key villainous role, the remake replaces this menacing physical bulk with the far more effete frame of actor Elijah Wood, who provides a distinctly un-Hollywood performance as the manifestation of adult perversion derived from family abuse and neglect. Equally, while Lustig’s original did hint at childhood sexual trauma as a basis for the central character’s disorder, Maniac 2012 accentuates this Freudian premise, by depicting a young Frank’s access to a number of primal scene encounters between his mother and her multiple lovers as the rationale for his malaise. While these nuanced alterations indicate Khalfoun’s efforts to update the premise of the original, these contemporary renditions really come to the fore through the visual style that the director adopts to realise his killer’s quest. Whereas Lustig’s original used a fake opening dream scene shot from the killer’s perspective to knowingly eschew the emphasis on subjective vision dominating many slasher productions from the era, Maniac 2012 is almost entirely shot from the killer’s point of view, with Wood’s image often only appearing fleetingly in mirror reflection in the opening sections of the film. This subversive depersonalisation of the mainstream actor’s image is further underscored by later segments of the narrative, where the performer’s onscreen appearance is largely confined to moments of extreme carnage (such as his intense murder of a ballet dancer in a parking lot), or subjective fantasy inserts (detailing his misperception of a potential romance with a trendy Manhattan photographer). These strategies both function to further denigrate our identification with the actor’s image, while the painfully extended POV scenes of pre-kill stalking are themselves used in an innovative and reflexive manner to further introduce unease into the spectator’s involvement in impending carnage. While its extreme scenes of violence will ensure that Maniac 2012 garners more controversy than its 1980 template, its innovative use of subjective camera and anti-studio use of casting very much indicate that the American horror remake market has finally come of age, and is clearly now producing as startling and suggestive renditions as the grindhouse classics to which they refer.  

While Khalfoun’s remake utilized subjective imagery to powerful effect, a number of entries to Sitges 2012 also exploited the current vogue for handy-cam horror as a way of highlighting wider moralities within the celluloid desire to look. These included the found footage compendium V/H/S (Adam Wingard, Ti West, David Bruckner, Glen McQuaid, Joe Swanberg), which offers a series of deliciously perverse morality tales that gruesomely turn male voyeuristic desires back on these unwitting viewers. The film uses the theme of a gang of criminal cineastes who break into a home looking for a rare VHS tape as a plot device to explore differing horror vignettes contained within the grainy recordings that the group uncover. Although the perverse portmanteau inserts that follow contain a variety of storylines, they are wedded to a sustained examination of the abuse of videotape, celluloid and cyber technologies by male protagonists. In one particularly memorable tale, a party of frat-packers equip themselves with a digital recorder concealed in a pair of spectacles, which they use to secretly film their sexual exploits with the unwitting young females they encounter. The terrifying trade-off to the tale occurs after the group picking up an unwilling teenage girl whom they then ply with drink as a precursor to a (near enforced) group sex act. At the point of anticipated sexual climax, the woman transforms into a sexually voracious monster who mutilates and castrates the male party, with her violent actions being memorialised on the secret recording equipment of the dead protagonist. Other sub-narratives contained within V/H/S reiterate themes of fatal voyeurism, with another standout segment using the American road trip motif to explore a couple’s conflict that arises from a male partner’s attempts to pressure his girlfriend into stripping for cam session. When the filmed money shot is finally delivered, it centres on the male protagonist being brutally and suddenly dispatched by his partner’s lesbian lover, who has been secretly trailing and filming the couple for her own gratification.

Having helped develop the current found footage horror vogue that V/H/S and other Sitges 2012 entries drew on, it seemed more than appropriate that Eduardo ‘Blair Witch Project’ Sánchez also returned to the cam carnage canon with the genuinely unsettling Lovely Molly (2012). The film begins with the ill-fated heroine Molly (Gretchen Lodge) recording a cam diary to expose the unseen horrors she is witnessing, before more domestic footage of her wedding ceremony is aired, serving to situate her predicament as a consequence of the couple moving back into the heroine’s old family home. Here, what starts out as unexplained and sinister sounds emanating from the old countryside dwelling rapidly develops to reveal near buried scenarios of sexual abuse enacted by a tormenting father who refuses to stay dead. 

Confronting traumas on cam: primal pasts are revealed in the unsettling Lovely Molly

Although Molly’s fears that she has been infected by the spirit of this undead abuser are dismissed because of an unresolved heroin addiction, later actions (including her obscene bout of copulation with an invisible suitor that are caught on shopping mall surveillance footage) add weight to these supernatural claims.  Indeed, building on his prior use of camera innovation, Sánchez effectively realises Molly’s psychological decline through a range of differing digital modes, with direct character interactions constantly intercut with cam footage revealing family secrets that refuse to lie in the past. While these complex celluloid collages make Lovely Molly an interesting visual exercise in terror, a skilful use of differing soundscapes also adds to the film’s impact. These devices are themselves punctuates by unsettling scenes of sexuality and violence that make the film both uncomfortable and yet compelling viewing, long before Molly’s camcorder finally reveals the full extent of her actions.     

Blind Obedience, Blood Bonds 
While titles such as V/H/S and Lovely Molly explore the cruel consequences to celluloid and cam cultures, Craig Zobel’s genuinely unnerving Compliance indicates that voice rather than visuals can act as a true source of discomfort. The film functions as a dramatic character piece, counterposing the actions of a group of fast food employees with the disengaged but authoritative voice of a police officer (Pat Healy) who telephones the store manager Sandra (Ann Dowd) to accuse her junior female staff member of theft. While this accusation begins with procedural and rational requirements that the young female co-worker Becky (Dreama Walker) be interviewed and secured in an isolated environment until enforcement officers arrive, the disembodied detective’s demands become increasingly disturbing, thus inducing a strategy that gradually inculcates not only Sandra, but the other burger bar employees in an extreme campaign against the innocent youngster. From enforced body searches and unsettling scenes of sexual humiliation to an eventual act of oral assault, Compliance remains both compelling and disconcerting viewing that uses powerful performances (particularly from Dowd as the world weary manageress) and indie film techniques to good effect. As we discover, the mysterious cop-caller is in fact a perverse chat line addict, keen to see how far he can draw innocent bystanders into his unsettling chain of deception. What makes Compliance even more disturbing is the effective prologue which reveals the narrative to be based on an actual case of a (literally) crank caller who terrorised a whole fast food chain across the US by posing as a detective in order to coerce unwitting employees into his web of sexual abuse. Although the film’s extended scenes of gendered suffering split many critics at the Sitges screening (provoking several film reviewer walk outs), Compliance remains an undeniably important project that updates Stanley Milgram’s obedience experiments for the contemporary cult generation, while also confirming that blind conformity remains one of life’s true horrors.

Although Compliance compresses its suffering into a 24 hour timeframe, Jennifer Lynch’s Chained expands this campaign of torment across a decade, by documenting the amoral relations that emerge between a serial killer and the young boy he kidnaps (Eamon Farren), and then grooms into his regime of adult deviation. When a mother (Julia Ormond) hops into the wrong cab with her infant son in the film’s opening scene, she is waylaid and brutalised by the vehicle’s menacing driver Bob (Vincent D'Onofrio). This unsettling scene, effectively realised through an interplay of on and off-screen space sets up a compelling relationship between this brooding, but ultimately lonely killer and the young boy, whom he imprisons in his house as an unwilling accomplice to a range of sex crimes that span the next ten years. With her previous movie Surveillance (2008), Lynch demonstrated a skill in interspersing points of extreme violence into otherwise character driven pieces, and she reproduces it again perfectly in the present-tense sections of Chained that occupy the majority of the screen running time. Here, she effectively choreographs the mundane routine of the isolated and literally chained teenager (now renamed Rabbit), as he tends the killer’s desolate domestic space, before periodically punctuating these scenes with sudden and bloody inserts that signal Bob’s arrival with another female victim. As Rabbit matures, the pair’s relationship takes on an additionally deviant twist, with Bob deciding that his young protégée should lose his virginity to a woman that the pair can then both brutalise. This perverse coming of age scenario figures as the unsettling climax to the movie, while coinciding with Rabbit’s final, desperate bid for freedom. Several commentators have applauded both Lynch’s direction and her claustrophobic use of domestic interiors, however one of the additional strengths of Chained undoubtedly remains Vincent D'Onofrio’s melancholic performance, as well as the intensity of the dysfunctional father/son pairing that develops between Bob’s character and Rabbit. In her introduction to the Sitges screening of the film, Lynch commented that Chained should be viewed as an examination of how families create monsters, and her observations do extend beyond the perverse pairing of Bob and his kidnap-sibling. Indeed, the opening of Chained plays on fear of random violence occurring as a result of everyday encounters, before a far more menacing strategy of family conceit emerges in the film’s final moments to engulf Rabbit in his wider fate.      

Rape, Revenge and the Erotics of the Unsafe Space 
Although unsettling in its gruesome mixture of sexual violation and interiorised threat, Chained was just one of several strong titles on show at Sitges 2012, which seem to point to both ‘smart’ rape and revenge and home invasion narratives being two trends that are fast becoming dominant in the market place. Not only did sexual assault and its unauthorised filming become a revenge trigger in films such as Catherine ‘Ginger Snaps’ Isabelle’s cult comeback American Mary (Jen Soska/Sylvia Soska), but the tropes of rape/vendetta also featured in some thoughtful high-end entries at the festival, most notably Austin Chick’s entry Girls Against Boys (2012). With previous films such as XX/XY (2002), Chick demonstrated an ability to craft sensitively handled character led dramas, and he certainly brings this skillset to this new movie, which in many respects functions a welcome revamp of Abel Ferrara’s classic revenge Ms. 45 (1981). The film’s provocative pre-credit scene features a young temptress initiating an improvised S/M encounter with a bound cop, before purloining his gun and threatening him with castration. Although the credits that follow leave the fate of this captive male temporarily unresolved, this opening clip sets the scene for the searing examination of gender relations that follows. Here, we are introduced to the central lead Shae (Danielle Panabaker), a gender studies student who is first seen attending a lecture on the politics of representing the female body within cult traditions such as Manga. This pointed interlude, as well as a later scene of the heroine contemplating a lecture which critiques early feminist rejections of popular culture’s depiction of women, clearly indicates the film’s self-reflexive attempts to situate its own ‘rape and revenge narrative’  status against those wider political debates. These ideological issues are manifested for Shae when she is dumped by her sleazy older lover Terry (Andrew Howard) after he reveals his on-going commitment to a wife and young daughter. Attempting to banish her romantic woes, Shae is persuaded to embark on a late night drinking session with the mysterious and magnetic ‘Lu’/Lulu (Nicole LaLiberte), whom works in the same bar as the heroine. Although the pair are courted by a group of clean cut young professionals, Shae is ironically then raped by one of the gang in the corridor outside her apartment when she refuses to grant him a goodnight kiss. This act of violation sets of a chain of brutal extermination that subsumes both the violating youngsters, the duplicitous Terry (who reappears to try and violate Shae a second time after she seeks support for the rape she has just endured), and even the dismissive investigating officers (whose chained and terrorised pre-credit status ends with a much expected bullet to the genitals). Although it is Lu who gleefully leads this campaign of retribution, her character motivations and penchant for violence remain ambiguous. For instance, when a horrified Shae notes the degree of pleasure with which her accomplice mutilates men, Lu responds by offering a harrowing past recollection of how she was raped by her father and his friends, leading to her acquiring an STD as a child. However, no sooner have both Shae (and the film’s viewer) digested this unsettling information, than Lu breaks into sudden laughter, before mocking her friend for believing such a stereotypical fiction. While both Lu’s character and the wider logic of the film attempts to avoid any neat moralising or justification for its issues of rape and retribution, Girls Against Boys achieves a rare combination of intelligent gender play and crowd pleasing genre splatter, while also providing an eye catching massacre-in-a-disco finale, when the spurned Lu arrives dressed as a female Manga assassin to annihilate Shae’s new boyfriend.   

Because of its thought provoking and self-reflexive rendition of rape and revenge cycle tropes, I would easily be swayed to make Girls Against Boys my highlight of Sitges 2012, but this is a title that it would have to share equally with Ryûhei Kitamura’s nerve shredding thriller No One Lives (2012). As with Girls Against Boys, Kitamura’s film reinvigorates the equally controversial cult cycle of home invasion narrative, again with intelligent and complex results.

Home invasion horrors: No One Lives sets new threat levels for an established horror cycle

From its tense pre-credit scene, trailing a potential female victim who is suddenly felled by a bear trap, to its blood soaked finale that literally lives up to its title, the film delivers a potent mix of perpetual plot twists and graphic vignettes. The post-credit sequence introduces us to a white trash clan responsible for robbing and wasting the out-of-towners who stumble across their paths. These include the mysterious ‘Driver’ (Luke Evans) and his partner Betty (Laura Ramsey), two ‘lovers’ whose tense relationship implies its own darker undercurrent. When Betty is accidently decapitated during the gang’s bungled heist, the group decide to ransack the couple’s car only to discover a distressed and bedraggled female (Adelaide Clemens) concealed in the boot of the vehicle. In a neat plot twist, this hysterical hostage (who is also the victim from the pre-credit scene) reveals the Driver to be a sadistic libertine who kidnaps young women before developing distorted romances with them. Having been responsible for the death of his latest kidnap/love object, this sadistic loner returns to the criminal gang’s country home to wage an all-out revenge on the group with a range of deadly weapons that include crossbows, hunting knives and even car fan-belts. With its perpetually shifting boundaries between presumed victim and attacker, as well as the confused moral boundaries that this implies, No One Lives recalls the very best examples of home invasion cinema, with the added twist of an own-home-invasion when the rural thugs are reduced to hiding in their ramshackle dwelling while awaiting the killer’s next violent assault. With this new feature Ryûhei Kitamura has set a new standard for home invasion cinema, and will be interesting to see if this standout title is followed by a slew of similar submissions to Sitges 2014. 

With thanks to Alicia Giralt, Luis Miguel Rosales Diz, Diego López and the Sitges staff who assisted with the Cine-Excess visit to the festival in 2012.