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Films I saw at the HPLFF this year

Friday:

• 
  Dr James Xavier decides he is tired of the small fraction of the available spectrum that human eyes can access and develops eye drops to let him see more of it. (He justifies this by claiming that it will be helpful for surgery and, sure, that's true, but also he just personally wants to be able to See More.) It has disastrous consequences.
  
  So, on several levels, this isn't a great film. It's fun, but it spends a little too much time focusing on Dr Xavier's personal troubles, which are entirely a result of his occasional disastrously bad decisions. Also, understandably, the visualization of Dr Xavier's special vision is...somewhat underwhelming, being mostly colorful blurs. But there are some pretty great moments in it. Best of all is the climax: Dr Xavier is on the run in the desert outside Vegas when he stumbles into a tent revival. He has no normal vision left at this point and, during the altar call, he claims that he has seen the underlying truth of the universe and that there is no god, only "a light that glows, changes...and in the center of the universe, the eye that sees us all." The preacher pulls out the obvious Biblical injunction at this point and Xavier acts on it immediately. There's an apocryphal story related by Stephen King in his Danse Macabre that the movie originally ended with a shot of Xavier's empty eyes sockets with the character shouting "I can still see!" This is untrue; not because it would be a bad ending but because the film already makes that entirely plain without words.
  
  A lot of horror is about the fear of the dark and of the unseen. There's not a whole lot that makes the light and the inability to stop seeing a source of horror and that makes this movie special. In conclusion: hey, Magnus Archives fandom, do you know about this film? Because it is maybe the most Beholding movie ever.
  
  
• 
  Of the three adaptations of The Colour Out of Space that I've seen (this one, Die Farbe, and Colour From the Dark, this is the best. Admittedly, given how I feel about the other two movies, that isn't saying a lot, but this is a competent and enjoyable adaptation. It doesn't quite capture what I love about the original story - it moves too quickly, it's too loud and unsubtle, and what happens to the character is wet and squishy rather than the dry, powdery horror of the original - but it's not bad. If you want a fairly decent Lovecraft adaptation, you could certainly do worse.

Saturday:

• 
  Igor is sent on a journalistic assignment to a tiny island, where he meets the islands 12 inhabitants, none of whom believe in the existence of Russia and have all forgotten their lives before they came to the island. Also, they have nearly religious feelings about seaweed.
  
  This was...not my thing. First of all, the translation of the subtitles was noticeably bad, none of the characters - especially the protagonist - were particularly interesting, and the "secret" of the island (weird cult things, the leader has magically brought Igor to the island so that he can father her children) was both incredibly obvious and incredibly unbelievable: why this dumbass?
  
  There were a few atmospheric musical interludes, though.
  
  
• 
  The shorts are always a mixed bag and I prefer to make sure I see the feature-length films instead, so this is the only shorts block I attended. Nothing in particular impressed me in this block and also...okay. I know why it happens, because the only things you need for it are 1) a house, 2) a musical instrument which might be but is not necessarily a violin, and 3) the ability to show a spooky fractal outside a window but good gods, the world does not need any more short film adaptations of The Music of Erich Zann. Please just stop.
  
  
• 
  A teenager slowly realizes that her elder sister has been possessed/replaced by an alien and that said elder sister is grooming their younger sister for a terrible fate. This is a fun and suspenseful piece of pod person horror. I could have done without the fact that the aliens' plan was to impregnate a bunch of 6-year-old girls and the final twist is goofy as all hell, but the film was pretty fun.

Sunday:

• 
  This movie is a delight. Vincent Price playing both the protagonist and the villain! Lon Chaney Jr getting to be actually creepy! Elisha Cook Jr being Elisha Cook Jr! The film doing everything it can to persuade you that it's based on Poe for marketing purposes, up to and including a random crumbling gothic castle in the middle of a New England town, when it's actually just The Case of Charles Dexter Ward and you could have set it in Providence! Constant fog! Hypnotized ladies being chained to things! Cursed children with no eyes! Evil magic portraits! This movie has everything. Please watch Haunted Palace.
  
  
• 
  You guys, I love The Tingler so much, I have to gush at all of you about it.
  
  So, okay. The premise of the movie is: there is a centipede that lives in your spine. When you're frightened, it expands and your spine tingles. When you scream and "release your fear tensions", it shrinks back down to microscopic size. Vincent Price is a scientist studying this phenomenon that no one else in the world knows about. During the course of his studies, he meets a man who runs a movie theater with his deaf-mute wife, who has a terrible phobia of blood and is incapable of screaming. Guess what happens to her!
  
  Already that sounds amazing, right? But there's also the fact that this movie contains the first ever onscreen LSD trip! And the amazing dialogue between Vincent Price and his wife, who both loathe each other (William Castle did not believe in happy marriages) but are extremely funny about it! Plus: so, William Castle was all about gimmick films and this one had the best gimmick. Certain chairs in theaters where it would be shown were wired to produce extremely mild electric shocks, making the audience's spines literally tingle. At the point when the tingler is loose in the theater. And then the screen goes black and Vincent Price's voice exhorts you to "Scream! Scream for your lives!"
  
  God, this movie is so great.
  
  My absolute favorite moment I will put behind a second cut because yes, this movie is ridiculous but this moment is sublime and if you can hit it without prior knowledge the first time, it's so much better. So the deaf-mute woman is being frightened to death and most of the stuff being used is very goofy Scooby Doo-level stuff - furry arms clutching hatchets emerging from closets and whatnot. But finally, she's been chased into the bathroom and the taps start running. It's important to note that the film is in black and white because at this moment, both her sink and bathtub are filling with luridly bright red blood. Everything else is still monochrome - only the blood has color. It's so fucking beautiful, you guys.
  
  Please watch The Tingler.
  
  
• 
  Every year, one of the last schedule slots on Sunday just says "Secret Screening", with no information as to the film being shown. If you are ever planning to attend the HPLFF, you should really stop reading now and go in cold - I promise it's worth it.
  
  The secret screening is the same every year. It's an adaptation of Dreams in the Witch House that was submitted in the early days of the festival by an...extremely amateur film maker and is so hilariously bad that we just keep watching it. At this point, it has Rocky Horror-like audience participation.
  
  It's actually a quite faithful adaptation of the story. It's just that, every time the director or one of the actors ("actors") had to make a decision in making the film, no matter how large or small, they chose the exact wrong thing. Old Keziah the witch looks like the Wicked Witch of the West - big pointy hat, green face paint, clearly plastic novelty fingernails. Brown Jenkins is a ferret. None of the actors has any idea how to talk like a human being. There are several points where you can clearly see one of them reading their lines off a script in their lap. 90% of the characters have terrible mullets.
  
  God, it's so delightful.
  
  I've attended this every year I've been to the festival and it's always always worth it.

And now I am home and, alas, have a cold and a whole year to wait for next year's festival.