Julian Maury and Alexandre Bustillo are the xenomorphs of horror directors. The duo attach themselves to a subgenre, exploring its corners almost to the fullest, in order to make a film rooted in a given category, while maintaining their own identities as filmmakers. They’ve tackled home invasions (“Inside”), vampires (“Livide”), coming-of-age horror (“Among the Living”), and even an underwater haunted house film (“The Deep House”). But no matter which sandbox they play in, you know a Maury/Bustillo joint when you see it. Their latest is “The Soul Eater,” a procedural that ventures into some of their darkest territory yet.
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For the record, I’m an absolute sucker for horror documentaries. There’s no reality in which I wasn’t going to love “Generation Terror,” the latest from Phillip Escott and Sarah Appleton “The Found Footage Phenomenon”), exploring the state of horror at the turn of the millennium. If anything, I wanted it to be longer.
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Two couples accidentally book the same Airbnb on the same weekend. It’s awkward, but they bond and become lifelong friends. The end…if this were a Hallmark movie. Lucky for us, Director Mercedes Bryce Morgan has something more sinister in mind with her latest, “Bone Lake,” a thriller about seduction that gets bonus points for featuring The Exploited’s “Sex and Violence” in more than one scene.
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Much like Hansel, sci-fi body horror is so hot right now. From “The Substance,” “Alien: Romulus,” to the Frankenstein-like stories of “Birth/Rebirth,” “Poor Things,” and, well, “Lisa Frankenstein,” there’s been a glut of recent films about the minutiae of our bodies and how they can be manipulated and transformed. Entering the arena is “Grafted,” a gnarly tale of an outsider taking her place in an indifferent world, one face at a time.
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For genre fans in the NYC area, it’s becoming a new October tradition to check out the Brooklyn Horror Film Festival. Last year it showed some heavy horror hitters like “Stopmotion” and “Where the Devil Roams,” as well as a screening of “Maniac Cop” with William Lustig, himself in attendance. it looks like 2024 is shaping up to be just as big, if not bigger.
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Watch any behind-the-scenes vignette on the making of a stopmotion animated film, and your jaw will hit the floor. Making those films is a lengthy, strenuous exercise in tedium that you hope will yield a compelling film. We all love “The Nightmare Before Christmas,” but when you realize it takes a full day to record mere SECONDS of footage? If you think about it, there really aren’t that many compared to hand-drawn and CGI-animated films. Robert Morgan’s first full-length feature “Stopmotion” isn't a documentary, but rather a window into obsession like “May” or the recent “The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster.”
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