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: X (2022)

It's 1979 and a group of eager young filmmakers from Houston - fuelled by drugs, horniness, and dreams of making big bucks - head out to shoot a porno (The Farmer's Daughter) in rural Texas, to try and cash in on the emerging home video market.

They've rented a guest house in the grounds of an isolated farm owned by an old couple, Pearl (Mia Goth)  and Howard (Stephen Ure), who both appear to be several hundred years old.

Unfortunately, as you might expect from a horror film, especially one released on the A24 label, all is not as it seems.

Pearl is grieving the loss of her youth, and Howard believes he is no longer able to satisfy her, but the old woman finds herself attracted to one of the actresses, Maxine Minx (also Mia Goth), and when she catches a glimpse of the adult movie being shot her frail grip on sanity slips.

As soon as you see the A24 logo pop up you know you're in for a wild ride, and writer/director Ti West's X certainly delivers.

In much the same way as A24's Midsommar, Ari Aster's rural shocker from 2019, was a modern reworking of The Wicker Man, so X is a reworking of Texas Chainsaw Massacre (although certainly not a remake), with a heavy side-order of Psycho for good measure.

But that's also part of the artifice of the movie, as it's constantly dabbling in clever juxtapositions, foreshadowing and downright misdirection, as Ti West clearly knows what his audience is expecting and likes to mess with those expectations.

In fact, after a brief intro of the police rolling up to the brutal murder scene at the farmhouse, the story flashes back a day to fill us in on how events got there.

Almost a full hour passes - of the 105 minute movie - before the real violence begins, but from then on it's pretty relentless right up to when the credits start rolling.

Pearl may look as weak and feeble as Grandpa from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre but she strikes from the shadows with the element of surprise, like a psychotic ninja.

Conversely, Howard doesn't hold to no stereotypical slasher movie rules and is quite happy blasting away with his shotgun.

The first part of X is primarily concerned with Maxine, Bobby-Lynne (Brittany Snow) and Jackson Hole (Scott Mescudi) making The Farmer's Daughter with producer Wayne Gilroy (Martin Henderon), and cameraman RJ Nichols (Owen Campbell) and his girlfriend Lorraine (Jenna Ortega), who is acting as sound engineer.

Given this set-up, unsurprisingly there's a plenty of bare female chests on display - and a brief male appendage in shadow - but before you start to think that this is a real porno, the nudity switches very quickly from The Deuce to The Shining.

The adult movie-shoot-within-the movie is interwoven with discussions on the nature of film versus reality, while much play is made of future star Maxine's "x-factor" that makes her desirable to everyone, and this segues into the murderous couple's motivations, which are explored through the narrative of the latter part of X.

A prequel, Pearl, was shot back-to-back with X, co-written by Mia Goth and Ti West, set in 1918. This film will see Goth reprieve her role as the titular Pearl and fill in some of the character's killer backstory.