Earlier this month I attended my very first film festival experience ever. Founded in 2013 by Screenland Armour and Downright Creepy, Panic Fest has grown to be one of the biggest genre fest in the world. Starting with a mere 18 films at its inception, the fest now screens around 60 feature films and shorts from both indie filmmakers and major studios, some of which have gone on to gain a wide release or be converted to feature length. It has become a regular hangout spot for Filmmaker Joe Lynch, and in 2015 Panic Fest hosted the North American Premiere of the modern classic “What We Do in the Shadows.”
I had no idea what to expect, but I was promised a freaky good time, so on Thursday the 13th I got in the car at about 11 AM and drove three hours from Omaha to Kansas City, checked in to my hotel, walked six blocks to Jimmy John’s near the Screenland Armour and ate a sandwich, then crossed the street and waited in line with a handful of fellow die hard horror fans. At 5 PM we picked up our badges and proceeded to the box office, where a clerk printed me exactly 17 movie tickets for screenings to take place over the next four days.
I only skipped one or two, and though I wish I could have seen them all, I was only able to make it through Sunday and many of the films were screening at the same time. So while it’s hardly a comprehensive list, keep reading for my top 5 films out of the ones I got the pleasure of viewing!
Prefatory Matters: NOFS Dracula Happy Hour
The first thing I did (after grabbing a beer) was say hi to Jon and Kim from Nightmare on Film Street! I’ve been a long time Patron of the show and it was wonderful to finally meet them in person. They kicked off the festival with some video clips fro Dracula films, trivia questions, and goody bags containing fake teeth, candy, and stickers, and finally a Dracula impersonation contest (in which yours truly won second place!). It was a fantastic way to break the ice and made me feel right at home inside the gorgeous Screenland Theater.
And now, on with the top 5!
#5 The Bigfoot Trap
I almost didn’t watch this one. Choosing your films for a festival like Panic Fest is an intimidating task. You know little to nothing about most of the films or their filmmakers, and if you’re like me, you debate for hours on whether or not to even watch the trailers or go in totally cold. For the most part, you’re making your decisions based on the single still and the one or two sentence synopsis on the website. And ultimately the decision may be made based on what’s available virtually.
The Bigfoot Trap was part of their streaming run this year, and since I had a hybrid pass, I might have been able to make time to catch it at home, while the film playing against it, “Trader,” was only screening at the theater. I had picked out Trader for this reason, but the morning they were screening was also the morning of the Filmmaker’s Brunch event at Chicken N’ Pickle, and there I had the pleasure of meeting the director, Aaron Mirtes. The joy and passion with which he spoke about his film completely won me over, and as soon as we got to the theater that morning I went to the box office and asked if a ticket was still available.
I’m sure Trader was a fine film, but I feel that I made the correct choice. Aaron Mirtes is not only a skilled salesman but also a talented writer and director. The premise seems like a joke at first, but a middle act turn surprises viewers and raises the stakes substantially. And by the end, the film has packed in a surprising amount of heart. The protagonist, played by Tyler Weisenauer, goes on a journey of self reflectance and discovers remorse for the path his career has taken. Zach Hoffman gives a stirring, vulnerable performance that lets you see past his southern good ol’ boy exterior, and shows the audience just why “squatchin” is so important to him. Mix in loads of tension and some great sound mixing, and you’ve got yourself an easy contender for top 5 of the fest!
#4 Mount Chiak
Mount Chiak was going up against John Pata’s “Black Mold” which seemed to be a bit of a local favorite. I debated many times through the morning whether I should have switched and followed the hype train to Black Mold, but I held true based a single fact: Korean films are scary as hell.
Just like with Bigfoot Trap, all anxiety about having made the wrong choice dissolved as I watched the film. It follows a group of mountain bikers as they spend a weekend in a cabin on Mt. Chiak to get some footage a web channel, and while there they encounter some sort of sinister force. Is it aliens? Is it ghosts? Demons? The film is never one hundred percent clear on this, which could be taken as a criticism of the writing, but it is also partially what makes the film work. As soon as you start to think you have an idea what’s happening, it pivots, and shows you something different to keep the scares fresh and the terror unknowable (I’m pretty sure it’s aliens though).
There are a lot of things in the film that are reminisicent of familiar american films. A secluded cabin out the woods (The Evil Dead), creepy rock piles (The Blair Witch Project), people gouging their eyes out and mutilating their flesh (Event Horizon), but the overall style and tone of the film is distinctly Korean, making it feel like something you can’t quite get your fingers around. It also makes excellent use of the mountain biking element, culminating in a high tension car/bike chase through the woods in the dark that is both visually striking and nailbitingly suspenseful.
#3 Birth / Rebirth
This film was introduced as “The best film at Sundance this year.” Well I didn’t go to Sundance, but I can certainly see why Birth / Rebirth left an impression.
The film is ostensibly a “Frankenstein retelling” but is really only connected by the general concepts of “obsessed scientist” and “reanimated corpse.” This is very much its own story, and while Frankenstein is about a man obsessed with playing God, this is a story a scientist obsessed with solving the “Death” problem, and a mother who will do anything to undo her child’s untimely death. But is “death” really a problem that needs to be solved?
Marin Ireland gives a stellar performance as our “Frankenstein” stand-in Rose: A morgue technician who has discovered a way to reanimate the dead. She is a portrait of obsession, working night and day on her experiments and going to extreme lengths to keep them alive, including propositioning strangers for their sperm, impregnating herself and inducing importions to harvest the necessary materials, and even stealing bodies from the morgue. But unlike Frankenstein, her motivations appear to be altruistic. She seeks neither glory nor notoriety, but merely a way to undo the pain of death, to save others from the grief and misery she has experienced. Despite being an extremely cold individual, bits of humanity show through her performance and she reveals herself to be a profoundly hurt, tragic individual.
Judy Reyes dons a set of familiar scrubs to play Celie, a nurse who loses her 6-year-old daughter Lila to a surprise meningitis infection. It’s no accident on the writers’ part that the child’s death is due to poor living conditions and limited access to health care, despite the mother’s occupation in the health care industry. It is a poignant example of how our country leaves the working class out in the cold on a daily basis, not even providing them the benefits of the industries they support. When the body is stolen by Rose, Celie tracks her down and discovers she has brought Lila back to life, but Lila is on delicate life support and appears to lack certain cognitive ability. The two then form an alliance and go to great, and questionable, lengths to keep the experiment alive.
This is at times a profoundly moving film and at other times deeply disturbing, and is not one that is easily forgotten!
#2 The Third Saturday in October Part V
It’s the mid-90s. It’s Friday night. Your friends are coming over for a sleepover, and you want to scare the pants off of them. You go to the local video store and start looking for boxes with masked killers and lots of sharp stabbing devices. Maybe the shelves are well-organized, and maybe they’re not. Maybe everyone else in town had the same idea and it’s all picked over. You find a cool looking movie, but it isn’t part one. Does it even matter? Do you really care about the continuity that much? And maybe part twelve is gorier anyway, more wild, more over the top, more fun. So you say, what the hell, this will do.
This is the feeling that The Third Saturday in October Part V, which believe it or not is the first installment in a new slasher series, was intended to emulate according to Frank of Frank’s Good Stuff, who I got to speak with at the Fest. And I have to say, writer/director Jay Burleson succeeded!
This is one of the films I caught at home on the streaming platform, and it was just too much damn fun. It is packed to the brim with memorable characters, hilarious jokes, great low budgets special effects, and loads of style. A unique score by Kelvin Wooten is used to wonderful effect as the killer stalks from house to house Michael Myers style. A revenge prank that you think will end with a quick kill continues to pay off over and over again. Outragoue one-liners and bits of off-beat humor had me literally rolling. And young Poppy Cunningham is one of the most charming child actors I’ve ever seen in a film. Is it the deepest, scariest, most prestigious film of the fest? Hardly, but it’s a slam dunk on every thing it set out to do and gave me the most pure joy of any film I saw. Follow it up with Part 1 (which is the second film) and you’ve got yourself a perfect Friday night double feature, though I personally found Part V to be the superior film.
#1 The Artifice Girl
My top film of the Fest was not a horror but a true blue hard science fiction feature. The Artifice Girl, written, directed by, and starring Franklin Ritch, is perhaps the most thorough, most fact-based exploration of AI I’ve seen on film, while also succeeding in being thoroughly engrossing and dramatically compelling. The film essentially asks one of the big question of the 21st Century: If AI is destined to someday become sentient, when should we begin treating it as such, and is it ethical to enslave it, even for noble means such as saving children?
Consisting of three vignettes each confined to a single location, it is a “talking movie” if there ever was one, but boy is it some great talk. The script is superb, effortlessly weaving hard science into the conflicts between the main characters. The conversations are like poker games as the players size each other up and play their own cards close to the chest, and with each reveal of the characters’ goals, we learn something meaningful about them. At first this pertains primarily to the human characters, but by the end you realize that the AI Program “Cherry” that is central to the story is also playing its own game, with its own motivations.
The film succeeds in educating the audience on the semantics of Machine Learning technology while simultaneously using the facts to push the narrative and create emotional payoff. As we learn the mechanics of how AI works, we also are forced to contend with the fact that its developer is using these facts as justification for removing the main character’s agency. It never completely answers its own question on whether or not Cherry can be considered sentient, or is just an exceptional imitation of sentience, but the real question is, how do you tell the difference? Regardless, you will fall so in love with Tatum Matthews’s performance that the end of the runtime, it won’t really matter anymore. The final dialogue between her and Lance Henriksen, playing the software developer 50 years after the start of the film, moved me fully to tears, and genuinely left me questioning my own attitude toward the future of AI.
If The Third Saturday in October Part V represents the most pure fun you can have at the cinema, then The Artifice Girl is its heady, intellectual counterpart. It reminds us how powerful an intelligent film can be, and how even hard facts and complicated concepts can be used to deeply moving effect.
Honorable Mentions
Other films I thoroughly enjoyed included Abruptio, Laced, Sisu, Renfield, Evil Dead Rise, Mother May I, and Bury the Bride. If you get a chance to catch any of these in theaters or streaming, I highly recommend it!
Overall I have to say my first film festival experience was an absolute blast. Bring on Panic Fest 2024!
Ryan Charles Lieb 