Directed by John Barnard, who co-wrote the script with Carrie-May Siggins, Wintertide is about Beth (Niamh Carolan) whose world is battling a plague brought on by unending days of night and near-constant winter. She’s trapped in an isolated northern town close to Manitoba where the few people left are mindless zombies, overcome by depression, but at night when she sleeps, she’s able to enter another dimension that she believes can help her save herself.

This is a strange one, as Beth doesn’t believe in the vaccine that stops that disease, so immediately you feel your politics — also, I despise that sickness became politicized but it’s too late for that one, right? — you’re not going to be all in for. Also, she lies to her friends about her goals and while they made end up benefitting others, they’re more for her to find closure with her missing father.

Regardless, it’s certainly a new and interesting take on the zombie film, even if your pandemic fatigue may linger. I think anyone can understand that. Maybe pretend that it never happened and you’ll enjoy this a bit more.

Wintertide is part of the Popcorn Frights Film Festival. You can get a virtual pass to watch the festival from August 10 to 20. To learn more, visit the official site. To keep track of what movies I’ve watched from this Popcorn Frights, check out this Letterboxd list.

The same people who made this made the equally wild Lake Michigan Monster. Let me sell you on this: it’s a Merrie Melodies-influenced black and white no dialogue movie about an applejack maker whose life is ruined by beavers, so he fights back against them as a trapped and finds himself up against, well, hundreds of them.

Jean Kayak (Ryland Brickson Cole Tews, who co-wrote this with director Mike Cheslik) must survive a brutal winter, then learn how to trap fur, selling the dead beavers to The Merchant (​Doug Mancheski) while making eyes at his daughter The Furrier (Olivia Graves).

All the while, the beavers are planning to destroy mankind.

This movie is an absolute joy, a quick moving living and breathing cartoon in which one man challenges the odds and the beavers and the snow and the sharp objects and oh man, this was great.

Hundreds of Beavers is part of the Popcorn Frights Film Festival. You can get a virtual pass to watch the festival from August 10 to 20. To learn more, visit the official site. To keep track of what movies I’ve watched from this Popcorn Frights, check out this Letterboxd list.

Directed by Sam Curtain, who co-wrote this with Benjamin Jung-Clarke, Beaten to Death starts with Jack (Thomas Roach) being brutalized by Ricky (Justan Wagner) as the body of his wife Rachel (Nicole Tudor) lies dead next to them. Barely alive, Jack stabs the man in the throat and stumbles out of the room. He runs into his neighbor Ned (David Tracy),, but that’s just the start of his torture.

That title should tell you everything, because Jack gets destroyed in this movie, which moves across multiple timelines and spends much of its time showing a blinded Jack wandering the Australian outback screaming, covered in blood and dirt and near death.

There are long moments of a man in absolute pain just yelling alternating with moments of extreme violence and an ocular assault that awakened the dead body of Fulci who was probably either smiling or annoyed to be awoken from his slumber. You’re either going to love how audacious this is or hate that there’s this much endless gore. But hey — the cinematography is gorgeous and in no way does this movie do anything less than go hard and then somehow find a way to go even harder.

Beaten to Death is part of the Popcorn Frights Film Festival. You can get a virtual pass to watch the festival from August 10 to 20. To learn more, visit the official site. To keep track of what movies I’ve watched from this Popcorn Frights, check out this Letterboxd list.

I decided to go with the unfairly maligned Nightbreed, a movie that I haven’t seen since it played in theaters in 1990. Directed by Clive Barker and based on his 1988 novella Cabal,  this movie was a commercial and critical failure. Barker has always claimed that the producers tried to sell the film as a run of the mill slasher, when it is anything but. In 2014, he finally was able to release a director’s cut that fixed many of his issues.

Aaron Boone (Craig Sheffer, Fire in the Sky) dreams of a place called Midian where monsters are accepted. His girlfriend Lori has convinced him to start seeing a psychotherapist named Dr. Phillip Decker, who is ably played by David Cronenberg of all people. All along, Decker has been setting Boone up for the murders that he’s been committing, giving his LSD instead of lithium and filling his head with details of the murders.

Decker urges Boone to turn himself in, but he’s hit by a truck and sent to the hospital where he meets Narcisse, another man who knows about Midian. He explains to Boone how to get to the hidden story while he cuts off his own face.

Boone makes his way to Midian, where he meets the creatures who make it their home like Kinski (Nicholas Vince, the Chattering Cenobite from Hellraiser) and Peloquin, a demonic creature who smells Boone’s innocence, letting him know that there’s no way that the murders could have been his doing. He bites Boone, who runs into a police trap led by Decker and is shot and killed.

He’d be dead if it wasn’t for Peloquin’s bite. Soon, he returns to life in the morgue while his girlfriend decides to come looking for Midian herself. Boone becomes part of the Nightbreed thanks to their leader Dirk Lylesburg (Doug Bradley, Pinhead himself) and from the touch of their god, Baphomet.

What follows is a battle between the police and clergy versus the Nightbreed, ending with Boone rallying the supernatural creatures and destroying their home to stop the attacks. Decker is stopped, Baphomet discusses that this was all part of the prophecy and he renames Boone Cabal.

There are two different endings of the film, depending on the original and director’s cut that change the story significantly. One raises Decker from the dead while another places Lori into the Nightbreed. Both set the stage for further adventures that never happened, sadly.

Barker wanted this to be the Star Wars of horror films and envisioned a trilogy of stories. But the film wasn’t marketed well and never made back its budget. Barker said that the producers expressed a concern that “the monsters are the good guys,” to which he replied, “That’s the point.”

Marvel’s Epic imprint put out several comic books and there were several video games, but soon the film slid away into obscurity, Luckily, with the excitement around the director’s and Cabal cuts of the film being released, SyFy, Morgan Creek and Barker have announced an entirely new series based on the movie.

Interestingly enough, filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky spoke well of Nightbreed, calling it “the first truly gay horror fantasy epic”, as he saw the movie being all about the “unconsummated relationship between doctor and patient.”

There are plenty of music ties in this film, as the role of Ohnaka was first intended for singer Marc Almond and Suzi Quatro was in the film, but her scenes were cut. It’s also one of the first films that Danny Elfman scored after Batman. Barker stated that “The most uncompromised portion of that entire movie is the score.”

Nightbreed has more than held up, reminding me of the convention season of 1990 when you could see buttons and shirts of this movie everywhere. My excitement was at a fever pitch and I thought, “This is going to be huge.” Shows how smart I was.

Nightbreed is part of the Popcorn Frights Film Festival. You can get a virtual pass to watch the festival from August 10 to 20. To learn more, visit the official site. To keep track of what movies I’ve watched from this Popcorn Frights, check out this Letterboxd list.

The scariest part of the male mannequin killer is that we never see it move or kill. We only see its handiwork, as it only attacks when no one is looking. Directed by Micheal Bafaro, who also wrote the script with Michael Mitton, who also plays Jonah, the man who tries to help Frankie and earns the anger of her boyfriend Steve (Colm Hill).

There are some frightening moments, even some kills at a nightclub near the dancefloor, and the idea of the unstoppable creature following our heroine echoes It Follows, but this is very much its own film. Frankie has almost no luck, as the mannequin keeps showing up everywhere she goes, killing people and making it look like all of these crimes have one thing in common: her.

If you get freaked out by mannequins, by all means, this is going to make you ruin your pants.

I watched Don’t Look Away at the Popcorn Frights Film Festival. You can get a virtual pass to watch the festival from August 10 to 20. To learn more, visit the official site. To keep track of what movies I’ve watched from this Popcorn Frights, check out this Letterboxd list.

Featuring interviews with the members of Thou, Neurosis, Enslaved, Panopticon, Emma Ruth Rundle, Yellow Eyes, Couch Slut, Blood Incantation, Krallice, Mizmor, Weigedood, Hell, Leech, Mania, Inter Arma and many more, as well as performances by several of those artists, A Wandering Path is really the story of Adam Bartlett, who started the Gilead Media record label in 2005.

His label may have started small, but is now a well-known source of the best noise rock, doom and black metal artists in the world. He also works with Dave Adelson from the record label 20 Buck Spin to celebrate Migration Fest every two years, with the 2018 version being right here in Pittsburgh, PA.

Michael Dimmitt has directed a movie that pays as much attention to the reasons for the music as the music itself. You’ll discover how several of these artists have used the power of this dark form of music to get past the pain in their lives. I was most impressed by Austin Lunn of Panopticon. His band’s music combines black metal with bluegrass and folk with Appalachian instruments such as banjo, fiddle, bells and acoustic guitar breaking up the expected distortion and thundering drums. In the same way that Norweigan black metal bands drew upon the past of their country for inspiration, his work draws upon issues and themes unique to his Kentucky home.

This is a difficult subject to make a movie about as just getting into who the label is, what Migration Fest is and each of these bands, not to mention the genres that all appear, could all be their own films. Dimmitt has played in bands like Disassociate, Mutilation Rites and Overdose as well as working as an editor, including on a film that tried to explain black metal, Until the Light Takes Us.

The main issue is that this is such a niche subject — it’s similar to making a documentary on a deep cut exploitation director like Franco or Rollin — that it may not be able to make much sense for newcomers. And for those who are already well-versed in this music, it may seem like it’s glossing over its subject. There’s also a fair amount of “we’re all a family” scenesterism, but that happens any time you get metal folks together. It’s genuine, even if from the outside it may not feel like that.

Is this movie successful? It caused me to look up several of these bands and listen to their work. I think that’s a very clear case of it working quite well.

You can learn more at the official site.

I watched A Wandering Path at the Popcorn Frights Film Festival. You can get a virtual pass to watch the festival from August 10 to 20. To learn more, visit the official site. To keep track of what movies I’ve watched from this Popcorn Frights, check out this Letterboxd list.

Bridget O’Brien (Anastasia Elfman, The Once and Future Smash, Aliens, Clowns & Geeks) is a red-haired waitress and burlesque dancer at a Van Nuys dive bar where she performs Grand Guignol-style dance routines with her partners Pepe (Marcos Mateo Ochoa) and Leticia (Naomi de la Cruz) while avoiding the sexual come-ons of her boss Tony (Tom Ayers).

Her life isn’t all that great, despite her perky attitude. Her boyfriend Edwin (Christian Prentice) basically sleeps around right in her face and the guy who seems like a knight in shining armor, a lawyer named Goldman (Adam J. Smith) assaults her and she ends up in jail when she fights back. She’s soon attacked all over again by a female prison guard and tries to kill herself before she’s saved by Baron Samedi (Jean Charles), who thinks that she’s the reincarnation of his long-dead wife, Maman Brigitte, the former Celtic goddess who has become a Haitian death goddess who drinks the blood and hearts of evil men.

He recreates the lost woman in the image of that scarlet woman and sets her on the path of revenge. But soon, she wants her soul back, as Samadi slept with her to give her the power when she was drunk on spirits from the spirit world. And yet Satan (Richard Elfman, who directed and wrote this) claims that sometimes, women will do that. I’m certain lots of folks will be upset by this moment but I am even more certain that Elfman doesn’t care. Have you seen Forbidden Zone?

If you haven’t seen a movie by Richard Elfman, well…buckle up. There’s a stand-up routine in here that’s more offensive than in like ten Hollywood films. Doesn’t mean it’s good, but it’s in there. What is great, however, is the look of the film, the music and the lunatic energy. I mean, what other film has a father and son lawyer duo — Daniel Dershowitz Sr. and Jr. (Rick Howland and Evan Eckenrod) — trying a case in Hell?

You can learn more at the official site.

Bloody Bridget is part of the Popcorn Frights Film Festival. You can get a virtual pass to watch the festival from August 10 to 20. To learn more, visit the official site. To keep track of what movies I’ve watched from this Popcorn Frights, check out this Letterboxd list.

Jen (Tedra Milan) is a photographer and her husband, Tyler (Michael Reagan) is a novelist. They’ve been evicted from their home, they’re low on gas and completely out of money. You could say at least they have each other, but Tyler’s confidence issues have driven a wedge between the couple. As they barely make it to the edge of a park, they decide to camp for the night. As for whatever money that’s left, Tyler has spent it on whiskey and starts drinking.

That’s when the masked men show up.

Directed and written by Jason Miller, Ghosts of the Void starts with a George Carlin quote — “The reason they call it the American Dream is because you have to be asleep to believe it.” — you may find it hard to sympathize with the couple, who have followed their artistic muses right into homelessness. Or you might think that that could be you someday. I worry about that a lot. But I also know that even though this system is rigged against us, you have to keep working.

That said, the end of this, as the golfing at the country club continues despite the violence of the night before, rings more true and is more frightening in its coldness than almost anything else in this film.

Ghosts of the Void is part of the Popcorn Frights Film Festival. You can get a virtual pass to watch the festival from August 10 to 20. To learn more, visit the official site. To keep track of what movies I’ve watched from this Popcorn Frights, check out this Letterboxd list.

South of Chile, if not heaven, a trio of twenty-something women have formed a black metal band, Invoking Yell, and taken to the woods to record their first album. They decide that to capture their sound, they need to find psicofonias, quite literally the voices of dead children killed in a schoolbus accident, inside the forest. While they film their recording, things go wrong. Or right.

Directed by Patricio Valladares, who co-wrote this with Barry Keating, this brings back one of the ideas in their movie Embryo and has a music video in the woods that slowly unravels. It starts with a quote from Maximiliano Sánchez Mondaca, which claims that while the rise of black metal around the world led to more bands trying to record their own music, it also brought about more Satanic rites, vandalism and murder.

Andrea (María Jesús Marcone), Tania (Macarena Carrere) and Ruth (Andrea Ozuljevich) are now in the same conundrum that artists like Snorre Westvold Ruch, Varg Vikernes, Euronymous, Samoth, Jorn Inge Tunsberg, Faust, Dead and Andreas “C. H. Surt” Kirchner, Sebastian “Dark Mark Doom” Schauseil and Ronald “Wolf” Möbus of Absurd — named for, yes, the George Eastman movie  — found themselves in. How long can you pretend to be amoral and evil before you have to prove it for real?

A movie that claims to be found footage from Ruth’s video camera as the women recorded in 1997, this finds Tania and Ruth enjoying their time in the woods — drugs and drinks are had by all — while Angela seems devoted to reaching true kvlt status and following up on her goal of having music bringing suffering.

There’s plenty of enjoy here, as you learn how the women want to break out of just being used for their bodies and need to establish their own music. To stand out in a scene where church burning, suicide and seld-mutilation is the norm, however, they’re going to have to go too far to make that happen.

Chile is also known for its extreme music with nearly three thousand bands listed on Encyclopaedia Metallum as proof. There’s Skullshredder, Desecrator and Negro from Slaughtbbath, as well as Ecologist, Invocation Spells, Sol Sistere, Death Yell and many more. Just check out this Spotify list.

The moments of the girls talking about who is true and who isn’t may seem silly, but Euronymous used to be quoted saying stuff like, “I would rather sit at home and cut myself than go to parties.” and that he would only sign evil bands to his label, Deathlike Silence.

Beyond the music, I think that any fan of found footage will enjoy this, even if you don’t have an opinion on Immortal being better with or without Abbath.

I watched Invoking Yell at the Popcorn Frights Film Festival. You can get a virtual pass to watch the festival from August 10 to 20. To learn more, visit the official site. To keep track of what movies I’ve watched from this Popcorn Frights, check out this Letterboxd list.

Tilly (Anna Bullard), Monica (Annie Hamilton), Peter (Rory Alexander) and Allison (Grace Binford Sheene).are in a car crash and everyone survives except Allison, whose uncle blames them for her death. Monica has a plan for the summer, as she thinks they should all get out of town and go to the country. That way they can work through their grief and be away from the stares of people who think that they killed their friend. The summerhouse they are staying in is a welcome place of normalcy until a masked man shows up to make them all pay.

Directed by Alex Herron and written by Ulrvik Kraft, this Scandinavian-shot movie continues the trends of twentysomething teenagers from 90s horror. This movie feels like I Know What You Did Last Summer mixed with a home invasion, well, that’s what it is. The difference is the teens in that movie all felt a sense that their life had been destroyed by their secret. Maybe it’s the length of time since the accident, but not everyone here is working through it here. That said, the last ten minutes of this movie are intensely rough as everyone pays for their crime, but the final resolution feels too easy. But man, that drowning scene? Intense.

Dark Windows is far from perfect, but there’s something here. I think Herron and Kraft have a better movie in them and it will be great to see it happen.

Dark Windows is part of the Popcorn Frights Film Festival. You can get a virtual pass to watch the festival from August 10 to 20. To learn more, visit the official site. To keep track of what movies I’ve watched from this Popcorn Frights, check out this Letterboxd list.