Beyond Fest 2024
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Stephen King will be there in spirit. The twelfth edition of Beyond Fest, which bills itself as “the biggest and highest-attended genre film festival in the U.S.,” will open in Los Angeles on Wednesday with the world premiere of Gary Dauberman’s Salem’s Lot, a fresh adaptation of the 1975 novel that King himself once described as Peyton Place meets Dracula. On Saturday, King will appear as one of five interviewees in Alexandre O. Philippe’s Chain Reactions, a meditation on the long shadow Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre has cast since its release fifty years ago.
Chain Reactions will naturally screen as part of a double bill with a 35 mm print of the film that contributors to Slant voted to the top of its list of the hundred best horror movies of all time a couple of years ago. “Snapshot of Vietnam-era outrage?” asked Fernando F. Croce. “Indictment of all-devouring capitalism? Blood-spattered redneck Theater of Cruelty? Yes to all, plus the screen’s most grueling portrait of mushrooming terror. Decades of sequels, remakes, and imitators can’t take away its scabrous power.”
Cowriter Kim Henkel, cinematographer Daniel Pearl, and several members of the cast and crew will take part in a Q&A, and Philippe will be on hand to say a few words about Chain Reactions. On a set that the Film Verdict’s Max Borg describes as “an expressionistic replica of the Sawyer house from the original movie,” Patton Oswalt, Takashi Miike, director Karyn Kusama (Girlfight, Jennifer’s Body), critic Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, and of course, Stephen King discuss the lasting impact of Hooper and Henkel’s relentless nightmare.
At IndieWire, Christian Zilko notes that King explains how the film “prompted him to make a distinction between the emotions of horror and terror, pushing him even further in his quest to produce literary documentations of genuine evil.” Kusama’s “clear, compelling contribution not only comes last,” writes Anton Bitel, “but also feels like a summary of much that has preceded, while carefully situating The Texas Chain Saw Massacre both as a canonized ‘American masterpiece’ and as a paradoxically timeless chronicle of ‘broken masculinity’ and American madness.”
Hooper “once said, ‘The zeitgeist blew through me,’” Philippe tells Deadline’s Damon Wise. “I think that’s such a great way to put it, because I do believe that the zeitgeist picks the messengers, and the messengers are not necessarily always ready.” Philippe, whose 78/52 (2017) is a deep dive into the shower scene in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) and whose Lynch/Oz (2022) explores the many ways that Victor Fleming’s The Wizard of Oz (1939) haunts the work of David Lynch, is currently working on two films, one a study of Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) and the other a portrait of its star, Kim Novak.
Stars, Directors, Anniversaries
Beyond Fest 2024 will present eighty-two features, and several of them are marking anniversaries this year. Keanu Reeves, Sandra Bullock, and director Jan de Bont will usher in Speed’s thirtieth, and screenwriters Larry Karaszewski and Scott Alexander will celebrate a turning point in their careers with a 35 mm print of Tim Burton’s Ed Wood, which was also released in 1994.
At RogerEbert.com, Jason Bailey talks with Karaszewski about his and Alexander’s unique—and winning—approach to the biopic, which steers clear of exhaustive and exhausting cradle-to-grave narratives to focus on crucial moments in the lives of such one-of-a-kind characters as Andy Kaufman (Man on the Moon, 1999) and Rudy Ray Moore (Dolemite Is My Name, 2019).
“So look at Ed,” says Karaszewski, referring to the auteur behind some of the most endearingly bad films ever made, including Plan 9 from Outer Space (1957). “He came out to Hollywood. He had dreams, he loved horror films and monster movies and science fiction movies. And he wound up making eight or nine of them! And he did it with his friends, and he had passion! What if we celebrate that? What if we celebrate him, rather than make fun of him?”
“For better and for worse,” writes Esther Zuckerman in the New York Times, Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook, which turns ten this year, “arguably served as the inception point for the latest wave of ‘elevated horror,’ a.k.a. horror with stuff on its mind.” The death of her father was on Kent’s mind when she wrote what would become her debut feature, the story of a single mother, Amelia (Essie Davis), who lost her husband the day she gave birth to her son. Now six, Samuel (Noah Wiseman) asks his mom to read a mysterious pop-up book about a spindly monster with a top hat. Samuel believes that Mister Babadook is real.
“I was fascinated with this idea of someone pushing down so much and the pain having such energy that it had to go somewhere,” Kent tells Jack Dunn in Variety. “So it splits off and becomes a separate thing that says, ‘Look at me. Remember me?’” The Babadook “creates tension not with jump scares or chase sequences,” wrote Slate’s Dana Stevens in 2014, “but with judicious editing and slow-burn suspense—that is, until it descends into a final half-hour of harrowing emotional and physical intensity, an extended climax that made me gasp aloud, hide my eyes, and weep at least twice.”
In 2017, Vox’s Alex Abad-Santos tracked the unexpected emergence of Mister Babadook as a queer icon. “If it’s a meme that was meaningless or someone tweeted about it or whatever, it would have just come and gone,” Kent tells Manuel Betancourt in the Los Angeles Times. “It would have been funny for a week. But there’s something that’s sticking.”
On Thursday, Kent will take part in Q&As following screenings of The Babadook and her follow-up, The Nightingale (2018), and on Sunday, she’ll introduce a screening of Robert Bresson’s A Man Escaped (1956) on 35 mm. A month or two ago, she tells Talkhouse, she caught a full Bresson retrospective in her hometown, Brisbane. “A number of my film projects had fallen apart,” she says, “and I thought, ‘Why am I doing this? Why am I even bothering?’ Robert Bresson showed me why I should keep going.”
Good thing she did. She tells Dunn that she’s finally lined up her next project: “It’s set in Ireland in the 1700s and it deals with Irish folklore. I’m working with a fellow writer on that. It’s a six-part one-off series. Irish myth and folklore. You think it’s these dancing leprechauns, but in actuality, a lot of the mythology is very frightening.” The Babadook, in the meantime, will screen at Vidiots in LA on October 1, the day that the cult classic arrives on the Criterion Channel.
Pacino, Raimi, Kurosawa
Not every Beyond Fest screening will mark an anniversary, of course, but many will draw high-profile attendees. Al Pacino will talk about Tony Montana when Brian De Palma’s Scarface (1983) screens on Saturday. Walter Hill will present Southern Comfort (1981) and Bob Odenkirk will bring several members of his cast and crew for the October 1 world premiere of a new restoration of Melvin Goes to Dinner (2003).
Sam Raimi will take questions on Sunday when the festival presents a 35 mm triple feature: Darkman (1990), The Quick and the Dead (1995), and Drag Me to Hell (2009). Guy Maddin will introduce a lot of his films, and so, too, will Kiyoshi Kurosawa, whose Chime—the first of three of his films released this year—will close out this year’s edition on October 9.
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