HALLOWEEN HORROR: Antrum - The Deadliest Film Ever Made (2018)

As I've said many times I have a particular weakness for stories about cursed media, such as Cigarette Burns, Archive 81, Deadwax, The Hills Run Red, etc but the conceit of these movies tends to be that we, at most, see and hear only glimpses of the cursed object while our protagonists track it down and, invariably, suffer the fate of all those who have pursued it in the past.

The unique gimmick of 2018's Antrum: The Deadliest Film Ever Made is that we, the audience, are seeing the entire movie for ourselves, bookended by a pair of mockumentary segments, establishing the terrifying backstory and provenance of this "unique" print of a legendary 1970s Bulgarian (?) movie called Antrum that has left a trail of death in its wake.

In a sense, we are now the protagonists in the story of this artefact, "daring" to watch it despite its existential reputation.

The central movie-within-the-movie, while occasionally horrific and tense (because we keep expecting something to happen due to the manufactured reputation attached to what we are now watching), is essentially a grim, but possibly grittily mundane, nightmarish tale about a couple of children, Oralee (Nicole Tompkins) and Nathan (Rowan Smyth), on a camping trip.

The film opens with their beloved family dog, Maxine, being put down by a vet.

Nathan is traumatised by this, especially when his mother (Kristel Elling) suggests that Maxine has gone to Hell (for reasons we discover later in the film).

So Oralee hits upon the idea of taking her younger brother out into some spooky woods (clearly inspired by Japan's infamous Aokigahara forest) to dig a tunnel down to Hell to rescue the soul of Maxine.

Oralee has it all planned out as a therapeutic exercise, but her scheme goes awry as strange things start to happen and they stumble across a farm belonging to a pair of degenerate, white trash individuals (Dan Istrate and Circus-Szalewski) who like to capture people and cook them inside a giant brass effigy of Baphomet.

Although the role of the cannibals isn't particularly protracted, I still felt this was the weakest element of the film, a peculiar random encounter with shades of Texas Chain Saw Massacre meets the grisly realism of Man Bites Dog, jumbled in with the demonic terrors (imagined or otherwise) that the siblings were also contending with.

While this story on its own is a powerful thriller, with strong horror elements, the overriding unease of the film comes from what has supposedly been done to the print of Antrum that we are watching.

The documentary portions of the larger film acknowledge that there are subliminal images and symbols cut into the movie print, but there are plenty of other details (from Midsommar-style "faces" in the background of scenes to words scratched onto the negative) left for us to discover on our own, along with occasional odd jump cuts and auditory strangeness that really gets under your skin if you let it.

A puzzle box of a picture, where you find yourself searching for clues to the bigger picture while still being invested in the story of the two siblings in the woods, Antrum: The Deadliest Film Ever Made has definite shades of The Blair Witch Project and a soupçon of additional David Lynch weirdness about it.

Actually a Canadian horror film written and directed by David Amito and Michael Laicini, Antrum deserves praise for its hardcore attempt to establish a verisimilitude around the supernatural print of this supposedly cursed movie.

If you allow yourself to buy into this, even if just for the 95 minute running time of the movie, this has the potential to stay with you for the longest time... and don't be surprised if find yourself tempted to watch it again to see if you missed anything.

HALLOWEEN HORROR: Archive 81 (2022)

A shy video-restoration expert, Dan Turner (Underwater's Mamoudou Athie) is offered a once-in-a-lifetime financial deal to work on a sensitive project for shady businessman Virgil Davenport (Martin Donovan).

The job involves relocating to an isolated compound, where Dan will be restoring and digitising a fragile collection of fire-damaged video tapes.

He soon learns that these tapes, dating from the mid-90s, were part of a doctoral thesis by student Melody Pendras (Altered Carbon's Dina Shihabi) who was compiling an oral history of the eccentric residents of a New York apartment building.

However, as he watches the tapes, not only does Dan discover a personal connection to the unfolding story but he also sees that Melody seemingly stumbled upon a cult operating in the building.

Told over eight, hour-long episodes, Archive 81 is the latest horror offering from Netflix and I have to say upfront it's as creepy as anything.

Based on a podcast (that I was previously unaware of), for my tastes, this is as close to perfection as anything I've seen in a very long time.

I was also quite surprised - going in spoiler-free - how many coincidences there were between elements of Archive 81 and The Last Ritual, an Arkham Horror story by S.A. Sidor, which I read at the end of 2021.

Both involve cults operating in artistic communities, and, as we go deeper down the rabbit hole the backstory of Archive 81 pays a visit to a very Lovecraftian 1920s. 

The whole cult throughline has incredible Lovecraftian overtones, which made me immensely happy as the series felt like a clever modernisation of the writings of this hugely important and influential horror story scribe.

With its inclusion of another of my favourite tropes - the hunt for mysterious or cursed films - I was also reminded of the comic book mini-series, The Lot (from defunct publisher Bad Idea) and, of course, John Carpenter's Cigarette Burns, and Deadwax.

Initially I'd only planned to watch the first episode (I'd offered to check the show for 'gore content' on behalf of an old friend) of Archive 81, but I was hooked from the get-go.

I binged the whole eight-hour show in a day - with some breaks for 'real life', naturally.

Focusing primarily on Dan's investigation, and then Melody's as a story-within-the-story, some might dismiss Archive 81 as a slow-burner, but it's simply being methodical, with the viewer's close attention being rewarded with subtle clues and foreshadowing.

Some clues are there up front, like the references to Dante's Inferno, with the inclusion of an old film serial called The Circle, and our protagonist, Dan T, being led on this descent into Hell by a gentleman called Virgil.

And I'm sure there were plenty of other references and allusions that I failed to pick up on. 

By the end you will come to realise that everything was important. Other properties may boast that "it's all connected" in their rambling franchises, but in Archive 81 it really is.

If I had a small nit to pick it would be the special effects of a certain creature manifestation, but this is a very small quibble and certainly doesn't detract from the incredible, unnerving nature of the show.

Broadcast Signal Intrusion (2021)

Chicago, 1999. Video archivist James (Glee's Harry Shum Jr), haunted by the disappearance of his wife Hanna, stumbles across a surreal, nightmarish, clip of a "broadcast signal intrusion" - a mysterious pirate hack of a televised signal.

Fascinated, he starts to dig deeper, learning that these signal hacks are extremely rare and the authorities have managed to track down those responsible for all except for the one that initially triggered James's interest. 

He discovers that not only was this one of a pair of known intrusions, but there was possibly a third as well.

Mixed up with all this is the fact that a woman supposedly disappeared, probably kidnapped and maybe murdered, the night before each intrusion - and the last one was the night after his wife disappeared.

Instead of reporting her to the police, James teams up with Alice (Kelley Mack), a strange woman who follows him one night, for nebulous reasons.

Together they disappear down a rabbit hole of conspiracy theories, crossing paths with a selection of enigmatic and oddball characters, as James becomes increasingly paranoid on his dual quest to find out who created the "broadcast signal intrusion" and what happened to his wife.

Starting from a similar space as the far-superior Archive 81, Broadcast Signal Intrusion instead apes True Detective (poorly) using this elaborate, potential Creepypasta urban legend to obfuscate a very linear murder mystery.

I'll confess I was hoping for another Archive 81, Deadwax, or Cigarette Burns.

Being inspired by true events (there were actual signal intrusions of a similar nature in the mid-to-late '80s), I had high hopes as to what fantastical journey the movie would take its conspiracy theory-driven protagonist on.

However, of all the potential stories that could have sprung from this set-up, a poor man's Batman adventure - where the villain leaves a trail of breadcrumbs that only the protagonist can follow (despite years of investigations by various branches of the government and law enforcement) - was a major let-down.
 
There are films where you can recognise their greatness early on, but there are others - usually mystery stories - where everything hangs on the final reveal, which can make or break the audience's investment in the piece.

Sadly, as  became increasingly clear as the 104-minute movie dragged on, the climactic revelation of Broadcast Signal Intrusion, despite being dressed up in the trappings of James's dramatic dive into insanity, raised little more than a shrug and a underwhelmed "oh, was that it?" reaction.

For all the smoke-and-mirrors, James' unearthing of this great secret is mindbogglingly straight-forward, with the only real mysteries being the unexplained comings and goings of the small coterie of supporting characters.

Phil Drinkwater and Tim Woodall's script, directed by Jacob Gentry, was riddled with convenient coincidences,  inconstancies, and plot holes that you were probably expected to hand wave away with a "that's the nature of the beast" get-out-of-jail-free card.

But filmmakers have to earn that sort of trust from their audience and Broadcast Signal Intrusion falls well short.

Deadwax (2018)

To celebrate the resumption of my Shudder subscription I wanted to remind all you horror fans out there about the streaming service's selection of rare grooves and highlight one of its finest exclusive tracks that I unearthed several years ago: Deadwax.

From Indiana Jones's quest to find the Ark of The Covenant in Raiders of The Lost Ark to Norman Reedus tracking down the sole print of La Fin Absolue du Monde in Cigarette Burns, I have always had a particular penchant for stories about the hunt for cursed artifacts, sources of forbidden knowledge. 

Treading similar ground to the Constantine episode The Devil's Vinyl, Deadwax is an eight-part Shudder serial about Etta Pryce (Hannah Gross), a professional "vinyl hunter", who is tasked by one of her rich clients to track down the only pressing of a legendary record, that is said to drive those who hear it insane... or worse.

Etta doesn't always operate 100 per cent within the law, and so turns to her 'mentor', gadget-builder Ian Ullman (Xena's Ted Raimi), who also has contacts within the vinyl collecting world that can help our heroine.

Initially parallel to the main story, then intertwined, we also meet a police forensics officer, Len Perry (Evan Gamble), who accidently hears part of the 'cursed record' while at the scene of bizarre murder.

The mummified husk of the victim has had all the moisture drained from its body, while apparently listening to this particular record on headphones.

Even just listening for a second, Perry is touched by the effects of the mysterious sounds on the recording and his life quickly spirals out of control.

As each episode is only about quarter of an hour long, I'm not sure why Deadwax wasn't edited into a single movie. Unless the creators were trying to emulate the tracks of an LP, in which case they missed a trick in not naming each chapter a "track" rather than a "part".

That said, the strongest of all the episodes, which is almost a stand-alone horror story in its own right, is Part Four, which is a flashback tale about college radio DJ, Tuck Weston (Chester Rushing), and his encounter with the fabled record the whole series revolves around.

This chapter not only delivers some incredible backstory material for the story, but also amps up the strangeness that undercuts everything in Deadwax.

At the quality end of low-budget, while there's some weak rear projection moments on some of the car journey scenes in Deadwax, necessity definitely proves to be the mother of invention for the more surreal and weird effects that really bring home the Lovecraftian horror later on.

I know I bang on about "Lovecraftian" horror a lot, but while the recent Empty Man played to the cosmic horror of this sub-genre, Deadwax leans way more into Lovecraft's fondness for the dangers of weird science, with this story echoing several of his original stories in its ideas.

Written and directed by Graham Reznick, whose CV includes extensive work as a sound designer for numerous films, the unnerving creepiness factor of Deadwax helps gloss over the few cracks in the narrative.

Rather than resorting to cheap jump scares, this is smart horror that relies heavily on its viewer actually projecting themselves into the story and accepting that this could be happening to them.