The program of the 18th edition of the Offscreen Film Festival (for which I am a programmer) is now online.
The festival keeps an eye on exciting new talent while continuing to explore alternative film history. We have once again assembled an exhilarating programme of more than 60 screenings that swim against mainstream trends. From March 12 until March 30, we plunge into the wonderful world of film at its most offbeat and stimulating, edgy cult viewing, and all the genres from B to Z. And as always, to complement our selection of premieres, we present a special focus, a tribute and a retrospective.
In an extensive restrospective under the heading "The Haunted Isles: Folk Horror and the Wyrd in the UK and Ireland" we will be showing over 30 films, many in newly restored versions, at Cinema Nova and Cinematek. In addition to the original "Unholy Trinity" of Folk Horror classics rooted in the British landscape and its superstitions - Witchfinder General (1968), The Blood on Satan's Claw (1971) and The Wicker Man (1973) - we dip into paganism, witchcraft, stone circles and ghosts in a rich selection of otherworldly tales, including the newly rediscovered Irish classic The Outcasts (1982), screened in the presence of writer-director Robert Wynne-Simmons. Also on the menu: Jacques Tourneur's magnificent Night of the Demon (1957), Hammer's adaptation of The Devil Rides Out (1968), directed by the great Terence Fisher, and Ken Russell's bonkers horror-comedy The Lair of the White Worm (1988), starring Hugh Grant and Peter Capaldi at the start of their careers.
This retrospective will be launched with a screening of Rupert Russell's documentary The Last Sacrifice (2024), which traces the origins of the Folk Horror boom, lavishly illustrated by clips from many of the films in our retrospective, making it the perfect introduction to this theme. The eerie alienation of the subgenre transcends boundaries of genre and format to permeate science fiction (as in Hammer's 1967 big screen version of Nigel Kneale's Quatermass and the Pit) and fantasy, as well as television dramas and series, which we'll be celebrating in a special "Wyrd British Television Night" presented by Bob Fischer of "The Haunted Generation" blog. Among the treats on offer are episodes from spooky TV series such as BBC's A Ghost Story for Christmas, the controversial mockumentary Ghostwatch (1992), and a selection of terrifying government-sponsored Public Information clips showing what happens to naughty children who trespass on farmland or railway lines.
The Folk Horror phenomenon may have peaked in the 1970s, but we show, too, how its influence can be felt in more recent work by filmmakers who grew up in that decade: Ben Wheatley's Kill List (2011), Liam Gavin's A Dark Song (2016), Mark Jenkin's Enys Men (2022) and Paul Duane's All You Need Is Death (2023). Finally, the concepts of Folk Horror and Wyrd Media will be further explored and contextualised at an international conference featuring specialist speakers and a panel discussion. And, not entirely unconnected with these themes, our matinee screening will be the newly restored version of Watership Down (1978), the gripping animated film of Richard Adams' bestselling rabbit epic.
Under the banner "Weird Greece", we sample the recent "Greek Weird Wave", spearheaded by the film that put this movement on the map - Yorgos Lanthimos's internationally acclaimed Dogtooth - followed by lesser-known gems such as Suntan (2016) and Pity (2018). Then we dive back into the 1960s and 1970s, when the Hellenic film industry let off steam in an unprecented deluge of B-movies and exploitation pics featuring all manner of felons, jealous lovers, crazed killers and hedonistic youngsters besporting themselves on sun-drenched Aegean beaches, choice examples of which can be seen at Cinema RITCS, Cinéma Aventure and Cinema Nova. Revelling in provocative titles such as The Wild Pussycat, Diamonds on Her Naked Flesh and Island of Death, these productions travelled abroad to find enthusiastic audiences in non-Greek grindhouse markets, but have since been largely forgotten. Jacques Spohr, "Greeksploitation" specialist and editor of the zineL'Insatiable, will be hosting a special evening of trailers, outtakes and two sexploitation films. Meanwhile, rare items from his collection of posters, lobby cards and other paraphernalia will be on display at Cinema Nova.
Finally, in a special tribute to the creative Belgian team of Picha and Boris Szulzinger, we present exclusive screenings of seven of their films, all freshly restored by Cinematek and the Royal Belgian Film Archive. Picha, professional pseudonym of Jean-Paul Walravens, is a Brussels-born cartoonist whose adult animated features, such as The Missing Link (1980) and The Big Bang (1987), are risqué, grotesque and defiantly non-PC, but also scabrously funny and boundary-pushing. He took his first steps in cinema under the aegis of the late producer Boris Szulzinger, himself a notable director of such cult titles as Les tueurs fous (1973), which prefigures the likes of Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, and Mama Dracula (1980), a horror-comedy in which One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest's Louise Fletcher plays Countess Elizabeth Báthory. Two documentaries - Cartoon Circus (1972) by Picha and Benoît Lamy, and Luc Jabon's brand new Picha, envers et contre tout - help put the work in context, while Picha himself will be attending the festival in person to talk about his outrageous 1975 succès de scandale, Tarzoon: Shame of the Jungle.
