End of Days: Dead by Dawn, Day 4
We really are the walking dead by now. Four days of constant horror and precious few hours of sleep has taken its toll at last. Three hours this morning: if this were the 1920s I'd be babbling about Great Cthulhu and feeding myself my own eyeballs. Happily in the 21st Century I can just self-medicate in the bar. Willpower and enthusiasm are keeping everyone going.
It's a later start today to let everyone sort themselves out after the all-nighter, so at 2pm we kick things off with Rob Reiner's oscar-winning Misery. I haven’t seem this in years, certainly not in the theatre, and wow it's not hard to see why this was such a hit at the time. Kathy Bates is a virtual hurricane and it's all James Caan can do to just react to her performance. It’s still a tight little thriller which works best with building tension between the two leads. When it all explodes into bloody ultraviolence at the end it’s almost a completely different movie and doesn’t feel quite right. Hard not to see Bates’ later career as community service for scaring the hell out of people!
Short break til the Best Of compilation and last night’s Ocular is still getting debated in the bar. I spot someone reading Twilight and my inner editor isn’t around to stop myself saying something. Short version: watch HBO’s True Blood.
On the way back up I put in my vote for the best of the shorts. Looks like most of the guys from the all-nighter have made it back, ready for the last stretch. Now we’ve got a collection of 10 of the best of the shorts from the past 16 years of Dead by Dawn. I’ve heard so much so I’m excited to see what’s been going on.
Buried could be a replay of The Odd Couple but with bickering serial killers. There’s a return to family horror in The Seperation, a nasty little stop-motion about Siamese twin doll makers who resort to desperate measures after surgery takes them away from each other. Forklift Driver Klaus: The First Day on the Job, is the faux safety video that was all over the internet a few years ago. It’s messy fun and on the big screen everyone loves it. We’re in a great mood. So the next few are like ice-cubes down the underwear.
The French Doors, a New Zealand effort, instantly puts me in mind of HP Lovecraft. A perfectly normal guy is installing French windows on his isolated house and disovers that they open a gateway to.. something. Another dimension? Hell? It’s unclear and the short has fun with the contrast between the sunny weather in our world and the bleak darkness in the night dimension. What’s particularly ingenius is that the film is just one step ahead of you and every time you don’t want something to happen, the next moment pushes it dripping into your face. Amazing stuff; takes a nice simple idea and does creepy wonders with it. Festival organizer, Adele, pushes the envelope further with The Ten Steps, a prescription for pure nightmare fuel. It’s deeply frightening and another simple idea that scares the hell out of you. A little girl is babysitting her brother in their spooky new house, a house the locals say Satan once appeared in, and the power goes out. She calls her parents on her mobile and they talk her through what she needs to do: just go down to the cellar and check the fuse-box. It’s tense, it’s very tense and the ending is memorable to say the least. The closing short, La Guerre, suffers in contrast. Mainly because everyone’s still recovering from the last one. It’s a French piece about a little boy and his infant sister in WWII hiding from a soldier. More cerebral than some of the others, it’s maybe one that’s going to gnaw away at us in the dark over the next few days. All of the shorts should be available online, so check them out, especially The French Doors and Ten Steps, but don’t say I didn’t warn you there.
Afterwards is the longest break in the festival so far. An hour and a half but typically I go to the merchandise stalls and then to the bar and then I’ve only got 20 minutes to sort out something to eat. Bugger. I fly to Subway and I’m just back in time for the next feature.
Dawning is a divisive one. The producer is here to introduce it and talks about how they wanted to make the Anti-Saw (not that I personally have anything against the first few Saw movies) and do something slower and more about creating tension. It’s a tough sell at this point for most. A family (oooh, family again) get-together in a cabin is disrupted by the arrival of a violent stranger who claims there’s something out there in the dark coming to get them. Things fall apart and it’s unclear whether there really is something there or the tension is driving everyone over the edge. There’s some great work in terms of building tension but it doesn’t really have a payoff and some in the audience just aren’t playing.
Afterwards, I get chatting to a guy up from Manchester about it and we both kind of agree that it, and maybe some of the others, might have made a better hour long Masters of Horror episode rather than trying to string it out for a full feature.
The penultimate film of the festival, Home Movie, manages to surprise everyone by being a nasty little shocker. It’s one of those ‘found footage’ movies like The Blair Witch Project or Cloverfield, but unlike all the other Blair Witch clones it really gets it right. A nice couple, one a minister and the other a child psychologist, inexplicably have the children from hell. Adele introduces them before it starts as “the poster children for abortion” and she’s not wrong! The movie is made up with bits and pieces of footage from the family video camera of significant events where the kids obviously aren’t quite right and gradually builds to a nasty and grisly ending. At times it’s really quite difficult to watch, particularly because the actors playing the parents are nice people and have a believable chemistry together. They deserve so much better than this. There are a few horrible moments and the movie gets an incredible reaction from the audience.
Only a few hours to go and the winning shorts from yesterday are announced. It’s Kirksdale that takes the prize (What You Wish For coming in at #2). It’s even more significant as it turns out that it’s a final submission piece for film school and they’re winning an award before they’re even out there yet.
Before the last film, Adele shocks everyone by announcing that there’s no Dead by Dawn next year. This is it and after 16 years of spending every moment of every day rooting through the best new shorts and features the world’s up-and-coming directors have to offer, she’s taking a well deserved break for a year. It’s an emotional speech, but there are promises made to be back better than ever in 2011.
To make sure we’re not ending things on a downer, the final movie of the festival is a French comedy called Les Dents de la Nuit (which also goes by Vampire Party). Yeah, a French vampire comedy. And it’s a wee gem and perfect for the state everyone's in at this point. A party animal and a few friends con their way into an exclusive party at the castle where the guests are pretty much the open bar for the host and his dentally challenged associates. Its lightweight throwaway fun and exactly what’s needed.
So it’s 2am now and we’re done and we’re over. The bar’s open for another hour and I’m totally beat and need to go collapse somewhere but it’s been a fantastic few days. Adele’s looking relieved and relaxed at last and it’s well deserved after all the work. I’ve enjoyed covering this for The Skinny this year; thanks indeed for having me. The festivals been an absolute blast and something Edinburgh can really be proud of. Hope to be here again when Dead by Dawn returns in 2011! Now… sleep!