The anthology ‘V/H/S 2,’ which plays Friday and Saturday at 11:45pm, is the first film in the new late-night series at the Del Mar.
A new season of midnight movies begins at the Del Mar this week, which is always a cause for celebration among cultists, cineastes and the film fans of all stripes who have turned the series into this area’s most popular movie meet-up.
This time around, however, there’s something new. In addition to the midnight flicks—which open with Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure on Friday, Sept. 27 and Saturday, Sept. 28, and run through Oldboy on Dec. 6-7—the Del Mar is introducing a late-night movie series that also begins this Friday and Saturday with V/H/S 2, at 11:45pm.
With the sly, tongue-in-cheek style that has characterized the midnight events over the years, the new series is called “Special Movies for Special People,” and harkens back to the heady, anything-goes early days of midnight movies. Back in the ’70s and ’80s, truly weird, downright socially unacceptable films got a chance to find an audience at late-night showings, when they weren’t taking space away from a theater’s regular rotation. That’s how cult classics like The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Eraserhead and Repo Man were discovered. These screenings (which eventually became series) at independent theaters also became a place where great films like Blade Runner were rescued from the celluloid trash bin. Even in the ’90s, I was only able to see movies as intriguing as Suture, as outrageous as Dead Alive and as truly odd asChopper Chicks in Zombietown on the big screen in Santa Cruz because of the Sash Mill, which also introduced me to unjustly ignored older films like Seconds and The Parallax View. The Sash Mill is long gone, but the Nick and Del Mar continue to carry on that legacy of bringing film culture from outside the mainstream to Santa Cruz.
Even midnight movies have changed, though. There is now a canon, a long list of films that fans want to see again and again, which leaves less room for the edgy new movies that could be tomorrow’s cult classics. The Del Mar’s midnightseries made its reputation by being ahead of the curve on such films, programming former box office bombs like Donnie Darko, Office Space and The Big Lebowski before they had been discovered as some of the best films of their generation.
This new late-night series returns to that spirit. Though the midnight schedule includes some intriguing and timely new additions, like the Coen Brothers’ vastly underrated Burn After Reading (Nov. 15-16), it also features classics like A Clockwork Orange (Oct. 4-5), Beetlejuice (Oct. 11-12) andThe Shining (Oct. 18-19).
Special Movies for Special People, on the other hand, is entirely made up of interesting new releases like the sci-fi tripper Europa Report (Oct. 4-5), the bizarre inner-demon comedy Bad Milo! (Oct. 11-12), the self-explanatory Big Ass Spider (Oct. 18-19) and the cannibal shocker We Are What We Are (Oct. 25-26).
It all starts this weekend with V/H/S 2, which is significant not only because the movie itself is a great watch (and superior to the first film), but because of its place smack in the middle of the most significant horror movement to come along in years.
The idea behind the first V/H/S last year was simple—grab a bunch of up-and-coming horror directors and writers, give them a simple theme to work with and tie the movie together with a wraparound story, in time-honored horror anthology tradition. Since all the shorts had to use the found-footage structure, it allowed them to be made quickly on a small budget. But they were wildly uneven. The best and scariest of them was David Bruckner’s “Amateur Night,” a disturbingly realistic mockudrama featuring a creature that film geeks on the Internet are still struggling to define. Then there was stuff like Joe Swanberg’s “The Sick Thing That Happened to Emily When She Was Younger,” that was just too weird to make any kind of an impact. The creepy wraparound story about a hunt for a VHS tape (each short film is watched by the criminals looking for the tape) was directed by Adam Wingard, who also helmed my favorite horror film of 2013, You’re Next.
Wingard also has a segment in V/H/S 2, “Phase 1 Clinical Trials,” which fills the shoes of “Amateur Night” from the first film—it’s also the opening segment, and the scariest. Wingard finds his own interesting twist on the found-footage idea, following a man with an experimental eye transplant. The director knows how to jolt without resorting to fake scares, but he also manages to create a weird and original little mythology in a short time.
The film pulls in two interesting directorial choices for its second segment, Eduardo Sanchez and Gregg Hale, who are most famous for The Blair Witch Project. Their post-Blaircareers haven’t amounted to much, but their involvement here ties them in as the sort of elder statesmen of the current indie horror movement (not to mention that found footage wouldn’t even exist as a subgenre if it weren’t for their 1999 out-of-nowhere hit). They have a lot of fun with “A Ride in the Park,” a zombie take on GoPro technology that delivers hilarious, early-Peter-Jackson type horror.
Overall, the second V/H/S is simply better than the first—more consistent, more innovative and way more creepy. The centerpiece is “Safe Haven,” a longer piece which could have stood on its own as a feature, but represents this anthology series at its most ambitious. It follows a news crew’s investigation into an Indonesian cult, and when things go absolutely insane inside the group’s compound, there are really no words to describe it.
The V/H/S films are the reason that anthology films are making a sudden comeback. Many of these same directors are also involved in The ABCs of Death series, which has 26 different directors per film making horror shorts based around each letter of the alphabet (the second film comes out next year). Probably the most famous director in the current movement, 32-year-old Ti West (best known for his films The Innkeepers and House of the Devil) contributed to the first films in both series.
This generation of horror directors isn’t limiting themselves to film, either. Glen McQuaid, who directed the short “Tuesdaythe 17th” for the first V/H/S, and Larry Fessenden, who produced West’s best films along with many others for his company Glass Eye Pix, just released season two of their series Tales From Beyond the Pale, a fantastic updating of the old-time horror radio anthologies. For Tales, they’ve roped in talent like Simon Barrett—who wrote You’re Next, as well as segments of both V/H/S films, and directed the wraparound story for V/H/S 2—as well as voice talent like Vincent D’Onofrio, Ron Perlman, Sean Young and Phantasm’s Angus Scrimm.
Some of the radio Tales (which can be purchased as audiobooks) are better than others, of course, but the truly transcendent pieces coming out of all these anthologies (Tales’ “Is This Seat Taken?,” V/H/S 2’s “Safe Haven,” ABCs of Death’s “Dogfight”) are proof positive that we’re deep into an exciting horror revival.
