LA film lovers, AFI FEST begins today, celebrating its 40th year with a lineup of 150 films from 50 countries across 5 days at the TCL Chinese Theatres in Hollywood. Landing in the midst of spooky season, it’s only appropriate that they’re featuring a delightfully unhinged selection of horror and horror-adjacent genre fare for the spooky cinephiles who walk amongst us.
AFI’s late-night genre programming has historically featured films like What We Do in the Shadows (2014), while the festival has also showcased horror favorites like Bones and All (2022). This year’s “After Dark” section features a gothic feminist Technicolor ghost story, a surreal father-daughter fever dream and a beastly small-town murder mystery.
The Face of Horror
The Love Witch (2016) auteur herself, Anna Biller, is back in glorious Technicolor with The Face of Horror, a “feminist folktale loosely inspired by the Japanese onryō (vengeful ghost) story, Yotsuya Kaidan“. Set in 14th-century England, the film follows the dastardly exploits of a handsome but dishonorable knight Edward (Jonah Hauer-King) as he kills a landowner and marries his daughter, the innocent Eleanor (Kristine Froseth). But when he later betrays her, Eleanor returns from the dead, hellbent on ghostly revenge.
Biller’s first feature in a decade promises another meticulously constructed visual feast, this time trading the candy-colored ’60s stylings of The Love Witch for medieval castles, lavish costumes and gothic macabre. Shot on 35mm, it’s also the most classically horror-forward selection of the three, with Biller once again using genre and heightened aesthetics to explore gender, desire and female rage.
The October 21 screening will be followed by a conversation with Biller and collaborators.
Full Phil
The latest from madcap French director Quentin Dupieux, also known by his musical moniker Mr. Oizo, Full Phil marks his return to English-language filmmaking for the first time since 2013’s Wrong Cops. The surreal comedy fever dream stars Woody Harrelson as Philip Doom, a wealthy father who brings his estranged daughter Madeleine (Kristen Stewart) to an opulent Paris hotel in an attempt to repair their relationship.
Naturally, things go spectacularly awry. Their increasingly bizarre day involves obscene amounts of food, civil unrest, an intrusive hotel employee and a vintage horror movie-within-the-movie starring Emma Mackey, Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim. For anyone familiar with the filmmaker behind Rubber, Deerskin and Smoking Causes Coughing, that should probably tell you everything you need to know.
Too Many Beasts (L’ESPÈCE EXPLOSIVE)
Small-town French detectives, wild boars and warring farmers all run amok in Too Many Beasts, a noirish comedy-horror-procedural from Swiss-Italian filmmaker Sarah Arnold. The delightfully strange debut took home the Europa Cinemas Label for Best European Film at this year’s Cannes Directors’ Fortnight.
Set in a rural French town where an exploding wild-boar population has fueled a bitter feud between farmers and hunters, the film follows newly transferred gendarme Fulda Orsini (Alexis Manenti) as he investigates a farmer’s disappearance amid escalating violence, local corruption and rumors that the town’s wealthy elite may be deliberately feeding the increasingly enormous beasts. Blending deadpan comedy, class conflict, grisly violence and provincial political absurdity, Too Many Beasts is the perfect kind of movie to earn a 9:30 p.m. “After Dark” slot.
Spooky Shorts
Elsewhere in the fest, the Short Film Competition features its own “After Dark” section, which plays host to such notable works as Mukbang, set inside an underground mukbang factory in a near-future dystopia where human appetite has become entertainment and participants are forced to gorge themselves for an insatiable online audience.
Also on the must see list is The Bovine Comedy, set in a future where cows have nearly vanished. Phop, a wealthy farmer who owns Southeast Asia’s last remaining bull, relies on Jon’s rather unique skill to help the prized animal produce semen.
