The IFI is again teaming up with Dublin-based club ‘Horrorthon’ to present another feast of horror and fantasy films over the Halloween bank holiday weekend. The programme is still being finalised at press time, but highlights will include the eagerly awaited new film from Cube director Vincenzo Natali, Cypher, which opens proceedings on October 24th. Another must-see attraction is the latest sequel to the classic Re-Animator, Beyond Re-Animator, directed by former festival guest Brian Yuzna. H.P. Lovecraft’s maniacal Dr. Herbert West (Jeffrey Combs) returns with that sinister luminous green fluid to revive more corpses, this time while serving a prison sentence.
We’re also pleased to premiere controversial director Jim Van Bebber’s Charlie’s Family, a powerful and ultra-graphic ‘shockumentary’ about the Sharon Tate murders that made the whole of Hollywood paranoid in 1969. Inspired by the plot of Cannibal Holocaust, this is a disturbing portrait of America that’s not for the faint-hearted. Also premiering in the festival is director Uwe Boll’s House of the Dead, a tongue-in-cheek splatter movie inspired by the popular horror video game.
South East Asian cinema will again be represented this year. Takashi Shimizu’s The Grudge, a huge box-office smash in Japan, is a spooky tale centred on a mysterious house with a sinister past. The truly berserk Ichi the Killer is the most extreme film yet from the director of Audition, Takashi Miike. In this blood-soaked yakuza thriller, the psychopathic Ichi slaughters a mob boss and is in turn pursued by the victim’s even more sadistic right-hand man, who slices and dices his way through most of the cast in a variety of gruesome ways.
This year’s repertory programme will include the original Friday the 13th, Mario Bava’s Black Sunday, Lucio Fulci’s Don’t Torture a Duckling and Jess Franco’s best film, Faceless. The documentary slot will be devoted to David Gregory’s excellent The Godfathers of Mondo, a candid examination of the filmmakers behind the notorious Mondo Cane movies. A leaflet giving details of the full ‘Horrorthon’ programme will be available from the IFI and elsewhere from the middle of September.