[Event Review] The Boston Underground Film Festival

The Boston Underground Film Festival celebrated its 23rd year this year, reveling in its now signature blend of esoteric, indie films with the delightfully weird and stubbornly anti-mainstream—especially when concerning horror—making frequent cameos.

The Brattle Theater in Cambridge, MA, played host to the festival as usual and showcased films from not only the States but also France, Slovakia, New Zealand, Norway, Germany, and more making their U.S. or East Coast premieres. Here’s just a selection of what I’ve seen so far. 

Moon Garden 

USA - Directed by Ryan Stevens Harris 

What’s scarier to a five-year-old than hearing their parents vicious, angry words piercing through the walls of their home into their very being? While trying to outrun her parents’ fight, the latest in what is obviously a pattern in an unhappy home, Emma takes a fall that puts her in a coma and a parallel land. Emma can see her body and the echoes of her parents’ bitter words turn to pleas for her to wake up, but she’s lost in the fairy trauma world of her imagination and anxiety. What follows is our journey alongside Emma as she fights her Alice in Pan’s Labyrinth way through David Bowie’s The Heart’s Filthy Lesson video; a stylized steampunk nightmare world of blown out colors and unreliable guides along the way. In pursuit is Teeth, an evil creature borne from Emma’s tears who gains strength from her fear. While the dreamy atmosphere and closeness to Emma, played with guileless innocence by Haven Lee Harris, allows us to remain in the unsteady and vulnerable mindset of the five-year-old, keeping this perspective also limits the development of the story beyond what we see and learn within the first fifteen minutes. It’s a story to see for the visuals. Moon Garden had its Massachusetts premiere at the festival and Oscilloscope Laboratories will be releasing the film in theater later this year. 

LISTEN TO OUR HORROR PODCAST!

Nightsiren / Svetlonoc

Slovakia - Directed by Tereza Nvotová

Seven is a sacred number not only in Christianity, in all the Abrahamic religions as well as several others, really. It’s a subtopic I teach in a particular class of mine as an educator at a cathedral, actually. But the point is seven is also a powerful number for pagans and witches and seven is the number of chapters in Nightsiren, which takes place over several days at Easter in a small Slovakian village where the old superstitions still overpower modern belief. It’s not the only time where the difference between the external and the internal are also actually the very same either. After the accidental death of her little sister Tamara, Šarlota (Natalia Germani) escapes her abusive mother and remote mountain home where the neighbors turn a blind eye to matters they consider not their business. However, they’re not above damning the herbalist woman of the woods, Otyla, they branded a witch and blamed for the sisters’ disappearance. When an inheritance letter summons Šarlota back after twenty years, she’s greeted with suspicion as the interloper now. As mysterious events keep ramping up in the town, the people refuse to turn their hostile eyes inward and instead lash out Šarlota and the only friend she’s made, another woman by the name of Mira (Eva Mores).Framing the hypocritical choices a society makes while creating its scapegoats with the lore of witchcraft, Nightsiren could easily lay the blame on ignorance but instead tries to portray all the roads women take for their own definitions of freedom and rebirth. 

The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster

USA- Directed by Bomani J. Story

Teenager Vicaria (Laya DeLeon Hayes) is exceptionally bright and bears excruciating pain. She’s a scientist and so she does what scientists do; she posits a theory and designs an experiment with observable results. “My hypothesis is death is a disease. And if death is a disease, there is a cure.” The object of her experiment? Her brother Chris. She’s the modern Victor (Vicaria) Frankenstein but as the classic story asks us, can man play God without the end results being monstrous? No, the answer is oftentimes no. While the horror of the “monster” plays out in the predictable violence, the most haunting parts of the movie are the scenes not with Vicaria’s creation but with her actual family. The opening scene that set her on her path as we see her mother shot while holding her, dividing her family in half; the two who will live in the shadow of the other two lost to gun violence. The showdown between her teacher and father (Chad L Coleman) who musters just enough strength to demand his daughter’s teacher be the adult not the child when they’re called in over a petty issue. Something that would not have merited a whole after-school parent-teacher conference had the student been white. The horror of the “monster” pales in comparison to the real human experience portrayed onscreen but the fact that the protagonist is a young Black girl in the throes of grief adds an original layer to a centuries-old story that has seen its share of adaptations.

RELATED ARTICLES

---

---