Ready for a long weekend of horror

Tonight is the opening of the inaugural Twisted Celluloid Film Festival at the Triskel Christchurch cinema in Cork City.

The idea stems from the Twisted Celluloid nights that film programmer Christopher O’Neill began at the venue on Halloween night, 2011. The monthly Twisted Celluloid shows cult movies, from Japanese animé and science fiction to camp classics and horror. But the Twisted Celluloid Film Festival is exclusively horror.

“My interest in horror movies is that horror movies, to me, are like an outsider genre,” says O’Neill. “There are certain horror movies that are made by the studios and get a mainstream release; and there’s nothing wrong, necessarily, with them; some of them can be quite good, as well. But when I was a kid, I was interested in horror movies and I got into, say, foreign language films, arthouse films, independent films, because I saw all of them as something different, outside the mainstream. I’m not like a horror film junkie; I just like films of all kinds. But it’s fun to delve into horror movies and find some really amazing ones, because, thematically, they can explore issues socially, emotionally, in a more visceral way than a straightforward film could.”

The 15 feature films to be screened over the four days are innovative and stylistically daring. Most will be Irish premieres and only three are old. These three are part of a mini Mario Bava retrospective. The Italian made the ‘first’ slasher pic, 1971’s A Bay Of Blood.

“His films are just so beautifully made,” says O’Neill. “He did everything in-camera. He was a director of photography before he was a director.” O’Neill singles out Bava’s solo directorial debut, Black Sunday (1960), starring Barbara Steele, as a perfect example of his visual mastery. “The idea of seeing this beautiful, gothic black-and-white movie in that church just adds another layer to it,” he says. The third Bava is the original version of Lisa And The Devil (1973), which was re-edited against Bava’s wishes to reconfigure it as a clunky Exorcist-type rip-off.

“To see these films on the big screen makes a huge difference, I think. It makes you appreciate them in a different way,” says O’Neill.

Opening the festival tonight is the Irish premiere of Franck Khalfoun’s remake of the 1980 cult horror, Maniac, in which Elijah Wood damages his cutesy Lord Of The Rings image. Khalfoun’s version presents everything from the point of view of Wood’s disturbed killer.

Closing the festival will be Rob Zombie’s The Lords Of Salem, a visually potent tale of witches who masquerade as a rock band. The festival will also screen his directorial debut, House Of 1,000 Corpses, as a tenth anniversary tribute.

As well as Barry Levinson’s unsettling found footage eco-horror, The Bay, the festival will also screen work from directors we are sure to see more of again, such as Pascal Laugier (The Tall Man) and Ricky Wood (Sawney: Flesh Of Man).

Twisted Celluloid Film Festival runs at Triskel Christchurch until Sunday 24.