This year’s Fantasia retro line-up features the world premiere of Vinegar Syndrome’s new 4K restoration of The Devil Times Five (1974). These VS presentations have become an annual tradition at the festival, emphasizing that this boutique label is more than just a home video company: they function as an archive of print materials, a digital transfer and restoration facility, and increasingly a producer of new content. The 2023 festival saw the premiere of their co-produced shot-on-small-gauge feature Eight Eyes, which played to some acclaim on the festival circuit and is out on disc this month. But there's something about the theatrical presentation of retro titles that is especially satisfying in the work of film preservation. It’s one thing to amass piles of discs for solitary basement viewing of forgotten genre-lore, much of it in line with what we now associate with direct-to-video standards. It’s another to taste the days when all this stuff got theatrical presentation, regardless of quality, and appreciate that these films were made for collective viewing on the big screen. So while the trailer for The Devil Times Five might not inspire much faith in the film itself, rest assured that the experience of watching such a resurrection with a Fantasia crowd will amplify the film’s effect by at least a factor of five, and provide some context in which to deliberate upon the film's morality play alongside a wide variety of other entries across lands and historical periods. In that spirit, I reflect upon five other bedevilled films from Fantasia 2023 as set-up for what’s coming up this year.

The most obvious choice to kick things off is Late Night with the Devil, by now well-known in horror circles thanks to its streaming distribution with Shudder. Watching it with a packed house in the big room at Fantasia was a particularly fun ride. Premised on the format of a late night talk show whose host is chasing big ratings to resuscitate a slipping career, much of the film puts the viewer in the seat of the captive studio audience inside the film watching the live taping of the Halloween special of Night Owls. The audience duplication effect was a little uncanny; I often felt compelled to clap when the on-screen audience was directed to do so, as though I was in the studio itself. And breaking down the wall between audience and performer was central to the plot, the night’s guests featuring practitioners of the paranormal arts charged with engaging the audience in divination of their innermost secrets. Things go awry when the opening act appears to successfully commune with the dearly departed son of one front-row audience member, only to then fall vomitously ill on stage and die en route to hospital. We later learn that the uptick in psychic energy that killed him was summoned by the host’s own pact with the devil, trading the life of his wife for guarantee of a rise to success in the entertainment industry. This devilish plot is revealed through the featured guests of the evening, a psychologist and adolescent girl said to be intermittently possessed by a demon she calls “Mr. Wriggles” (because he wriggles in and out of her mind). During a demonstration of this possession, Mr. Wriggles insinuates that the host is exploiting her as a product of his affair with the psychologist, which provided motivation for the supernatural murder of his wife. The panel skeptic disputes the legitimacy of the demonstration, offering audiences a look at how easily we can be fooled in situations of mass-hypnosis, the explanation he provides for what we’ve just witnessed. But Mr. Wriggles puts that theory to rest with an explosive finale that lays waste to the studio and most of its inhabitants. Levitating above the stage, glowing like a cathode ray tube and glitching as though the antenna needs adjustment, she proceeds to shoot beams of television light out of her eyes, vaporizing the guests and giving the host his due. The deal is done; his show certainly brought in the desired ratings, but at a cost he’ll never be able to repay. The film’s deployment of special effects that render the supernatural happenings through the aesthetic of analog television signals was a nice touch, suggesting that the source of the evil is the medium itself. Intriguingly, the film fell into some controversy upon revelation that the filmmakers had used some AI to produce three still images seen on screen: the “we’ll be right back” title cards that separate the live segments of the fictional talk show. Comments sections on social media feeds were filled with angry viewers saying they’re going to boycott the film for going down this route, touting AI-generated material as an evil that will lead to the ruin of us all. A bit over-the-top for the specific and minimal use to which this tool was put here, but the controversy speaks to much broader concerns in today’s increasingly AI-saturated environment, fears that replicate the general transition to digital technologies in entertainment over the past couple of decades, the switch to colour before that, the coming of sound before that, and the invention of motion pictures themselves before that. Fitting publicity, then, for a film that tackles medium-specific anxiety head-on.

Late Night with the Devil paired perfectly with one of Fantasia’s documentary entries this year, Satan Wants You, about the rise of the “satanic panic” of the 1980s as fueled largely by one single book: Michelle Remembers, co-authored in 1980 by psychiatrist Lawrence Pazder and his patient-turned-wife Michelle Smith. A Canadian production now streaming on CBC’s Gem platform, the film recounts the story of a young woman in Victoria, BC, who undergoes regression therapy to unlock memories of a nightmare scenario in which she was held captive as a child for over a year by a Satanic cult in the mid-1950s. As the story goes, she was subjected to all manner of horrific torture and witness to barbaric acts of violence and sexual depravity, only to then repress these memories for decades until their therapeutic – and highly profitable - release decades later. The film touches on many hot-button issues around child victims of sexual abuse and the thin barrier between fiction and reality that separates real cases from imaginary ones. To hear the original recordings of Michelle’s therapy sessions is blood-curdling, and this makes the first section of the documentary rather harrowing. Screaming on tape as she recalls being bathed in the blood of slaughtered infants is a hard thing to swallow, no matter one’s level of skepticism. The film handles this material deftly, alongside documentation of mounting mainstream concern over the post-1960s rise of interest in Satanism as an alternative religion by way of Anton Lavey and his ilk. But there has long been a misunderstanding of the position of the official Church of Satan, which does not actually preach belief in any supernatural entity, and the popularization of Satanic themes in films like The Exorcist and The Omen. By the time Michelle and her therapist put her recollections in writing, there was already a mainstream awareness of Hollywood’s image of Satanism for the book to plug into. And it was a huge hit, sparking a lavish book tour and creating celebrities out of the two of them. This was also a time when the value of regression therapy was coming into mainstream awareness, largely around the testimonials of true victims of pedophile priests in the Catholic Church and the increasing willingness of courts of law to accept the fact that, sometimes, memories of such trauma can be repressed for long periods of time and then resurface at a later date. Questioning such testimonials runs the risk of victim-blaming and, however inadvertently (or not), defending the institutions responsible for inflicting this kind of damage. Of course many would much rather believe that the sexual abuse of children would be attributed to Satanic cults, not organized religion with global reach. Of course, in hindsight, we know very differently now. In Michelle’s case, we can ask whether or not there was some kind of abuse in her childhood that was being misattributed to a fictional Satanic cult, the existence of which is easily debunked in her case. But more to the point: what was the role of her therapist in prompting this whole episode? The last third of the documentary is dedicated to demonstrating the highly questionable relationship that he had with his patient, ultimately marrying her. In the end, it seems an unethical romantic relationship developed between them early, and a plan was hatched to capitalize on a moment of cultural fear, spurred on by the media, and reap the benefits. But the impact of the Michelle Remembers book brought untold harm for the next decade as it was used as a template for understanding the machinations of imagined Satanic cults and held up as precedent for a whole host of other cases that came up. It also helped fuel the more general “satanic panic” that waged war against horror movies and heavy metal bands across the 80s, landed many people wrongly in jail (see the harrowing documentary trilogy Paradise Lost for prominent example), and allowed politicians like Reagan to imbue their rhetoric with a renewed sense of puritanical drive that preyed on public fear of an imaginary evil, much as he did with his double-down on the “war on drugs.” The Satanic Panic book, edited by Kier-la Janisse and Paul Coroupe (and launched at Fantasia a few years ago), provides a thorough account of the many facets of this phenomenon for anyone interesting in delving deeper. Late Night with the Devil picks up on many of these cues directly, all the way down to presenting its own therapist/child relationship popularized by a book authored by the psychologist that lands them on network talk shows like Night Owls. In Satan Wants You the manipulation of media for profit is clearly the work of human beings. In Late Night with the Devil, human greed is still at the heart of the events that unfold, but the clever turn is to imagine that, once manifested, the powers unleashed by deals with the devil take on a mediated life of their own, to the peril of all.

In both Late Night and Satan Wants You, the role of the intermediary, or medium, is central to the stories that unfold. Who stands between one person’s experience and its cultural expression, and to what end? The idea of the medium, of course, is at the heart of many a tale of human forays into the worlds of the supernatural, a role as old as human civilization itself through figures like the shaman in so many Indigenous cultures around the world. In Mami Wata, the gleaming gem of this year’s festival, the challenge of maintaining traditional beliefs in the spiritual realm is put front and center in one small Nigerian village on the cusp of modernization. The film opens with Mama Efe sitting as intermediary between the villagers and the spirit of the water, Mami Wata. The villagers must pay tribute to Efe in order to appease the spirit, but fewer and fewer people are willing to part with the fruits of their hard agricultural labour for a spirit that can’t be seen, and whose influence on the village is increasingly called into question. This problem is raised to Mama Efe by her children, one of whom is heir to the role of intermediary but wants nothing to do with this stale tradition. The issue is brought to a head when a child dies of a preventable illness and Mama Efe refuses to accept a vaccine from a doctor called by her daughter to ensure protection for the rest of the village. “There is no virus here,” she says, criticizing the shallow perspective of Western science in its belief in only what is visiable to the eye. The doctor is turned away. Dissent sows in the countryside, and a group of rebels decides to take control of the tributes with the promise of using the proceeds for modernization of the area with schools, hospitals, and the like. But their brand of intermediation turns sour as they acquire guns and begin forcing villagers to pay up without delivering upon their promised improvements. The climax is a stand-off between the rebels and the traditionalists, and ultimately it is up to Mama Efe's daughters to reaffirm their belief in the power of Mami Wata and call on her to restore order through faith. With sparing yet striking black and white cinematography, the film grapples with difficult issues around the role of tradition in the 21st Century, the hard line between accepting certain aspects of modernization while rejecting others, and the function of organized religion in society. In the aforementioned devil films, appeal to the supernatural is necessarily evil, whether that evil resides as a true supernatural power or simply (and often more insidiously) as a function of human greed. In Mami Wata this line is blurred, and questions are raised about the validity of both sides of the equation, with the role of intermediary subject to serious critique. One line is clearly drawn, however, around the acquisition of arms for social control. The film’s most powerful moment comes when the rebels receive their delivery of semi-automatic rifles, and their first test shots are fired into the air, cutting like otherworldly thunder through the rural quietude that pervades the rest of the film. I couldn’t help but compare this moment to the climax of Oppenheimer, which opened in wide release during the festival’s run. In Nolan’s film, dubbed “the loudest courtroom drama in history,” a deliberately chaotic sonic bombardment reigns across the film – UNTIL the moment of the Trinity test, where the world’s first atomic explosion is rendered in silence that cuts like a knife as we all gawk in awe at the visual power of the bomb’s energetic release. Cleverly, Nolan follows this moment of quietude with a sonic rendering of the explosion on a delay that is in keeping with the physical reality of sound’s lag behind light as it passes across the acreage of the test site. But for all its cinematic splendour, the moment feels contrived. The explosion of gunfire at the centre of Mami Wata, on the other hand, feels like a deeply authentic eruption of the evil at the heart of manufactured firepower. Much has been made of the birth of the atomic age as the unleashing of true evil in the world, perhaps the rightful beginning of the Anthropocene, certainly the harkening of humanity’s power to destroy itself completely for the first time in its history. Mami Wata dials down the global scale while bringing the same implications of self-destruction into the heart of the village of Iyi. And in a nice final touch, the film’s monochromatic sensibility is broken by a visualization of Mami Wata herself, bejeweled in rays of prismatic colour. Faith in the marvels of modern science must be tempered with a connection to the world beyond that which science can explain.

This year’s retro highlight was certainly the 35mm print of A Chinese Ghost Story, a veritable classic of 1980s Hong Kong martial arts cinema produced by action maestro Tsui Hark, with a story inspired by the 1960 Shaw Brothers production of The Enchanting Shadow. Cinematically, then, the film draws a direct line between the legendary productions of the Shaw Brothers Studios, many of which cash in on the cultural resonance of martial arts as an intermedial practice between the human and supernatural realms, and the grittier action-first output of the 1980s new wave of Hong Kong film that would famously inspire Hollywood through the shoplifting of Quentin Tarantino and his ilk. The story tells of a benign human ghost enslaved by a demon of the woods, discovered by an enamoured traveller who takes refuge in her temple haunt and resolves to free her with the help of a Taoist warrior. The film blends romance, action, and horror in ways that only Hong Kong cinema can pull off, with particular accolades deserved for its stop-motion animation sequences brining subterranean skeletons to life as the demon summons all her available energies to defend against the human attacks. There was a nice parallel here to another of this year’s retro screenings, The Primevals, a miraculous salvage of masterly stop-motion work by David Allen in the 1960s/70s, stalled by funding problems and then ground to a halt by his untimely death in 1999 shortly after shooting the live action sequences, and finally resurrected 50 years after it began to assemble a workable cut and shoot some required insert materials. The tone of the film threads through the distinct periods of its production history to weave a tale that feels simultaneously dated and timeless, an odd kind of wormhole that mirrors its characters' transition into a carefully guarded land beyond time where lizard people are in control of an enslaved population of mythical Yeti. In Chinese Ghost Story, such a land beyond time is the fait accompli of its very premise of spirits caught in transition between realms, requiring human intermedial assistance. As with all the films discussed here, the film raises questions about the balance between traditional belief systems and their modern expression, just as the 35mm presentation straddles the line between media past and present, striking at the very heart of the reason for Fantasia’s retro programming: to provide today’s audiences with portals into the pasts that have made our rich genre sensibilities possible, an experience of which I will never tire. Good news, then, that Fantasia 2024's retro line-up includes the Chinese Ghost Story sequel!

Finally, it was a great pleasure to witness Canadian cinematic godfather Larry Kent receive the Canadian Trailblazer Award in conjunction with screenings of his earliest and latest features, The Bitter Ash (1963) and She Who Must Burn (2015). The first was shot in Vancouver before there was such a thing as narrative fiction filmmaking out west, or really anywhere else in English Canada (the Quota Quickies of the 1930s notwithstanding), and was presented in a brand-new HD restoration by the miraculous new disc label Canadian International Pictures. I cannot overstate the quality and necessity of the work being done by CIP, who are making good on a bold stance in their belief that there's a market for home video distribution of largely forgotten Canadian films of the 60s, 70s and 80s (a national cinema notorious for its perceived unmarketability). Their near-monthly offerings reliably move 500 copies within 48 hours of release as a partner label with Vinegar Syndrome, and they frequently sell out their limited edition runs. Don't sleep on the Bitter Ash disc, out this very month here. And then there's She Who Must Burn, which made waves at Fantasia 2015 (see Offscreen's interview with Kent here). Marking another return to Vancouver to shoot his films despite making his home in Montreal since the late 60s, the film spins a useful counterpoint to the Satanic panic that gripped good Christian moralists in the 1980s. Here, Christian opposition to abortion renders a rural mob murderous in their persecution of a young nurse who refuses to close down the Planned Parenthood clinic where she works. The suggestion is that abortion entails the necessarily Satanic murder of babies, but here it is the anti-abortionists who turn out to be the blood cult fetishists as the nurse is hunted, tortured, and ultimately burnt at the stake, Salem style. A harrowing tale of the dark side of adhering to faith at the expense of modern ideals around gender equality, the film continues Kent's tradition of exploring stories of people marginalized by the tides of social upheaval, as the main character in Bitter Ash struggles with the reality of his pregnant girlfriend and the likely end of his career prospects in an increasingly automated printing industry. The anger at the heart of both films spews a bitter ash indeed, falling gently back to Earth to create a layer of cynicism that we'd be at pains to see through unaffected. Kent has had his finger on the pulse of social demons for over 50 years, and his dark horse is richly deserved. 

Volume 28, Issue 6 / June 2024 Blu-ray/DVD   Festival Reports   Film Reviews