[Event Review] Highlights from Mayhem Film Festival 2023

Have I told you about Mayhem Film Festival before? It’s a favourite event of mine, so I’ve blurted about it in anticipation to many people I know. The event has just passed, so now is the time to gush its praises to those I don’t know. Mayhem prides themselves on screening “the best in contemporary horror, science-fiction and cult cinema and television from around the world,” and that seems about right to me, having now attended four of their annual events. Mayhem Film Festival started in 2005 with a single collection of Scary Shorts and the Short Film Showcase is still central to the Festival. To me, I’m always going to remember it as the place I first saw One Cut of the Dead, Mandy, Anna and the Apocalypse, After Midnight and Daniel Isn’t Real.

A great deal of the attraction to Mayhem (and I’m sure other festivals too) is the breadth of variety they screen, great quality in myriad ways. Indeed, they tend to include a couple of older films in their programme alongside the new fare; generally one that’s rarely seen, and one “cult favourite” or similar. Due to that huge range in the programme (and how diverse it can be with barely fifteen features is always surprising) I really struggle to know where to begin in picking out highlights: I cannot compare the films easily enough to choose say a top five. So instead, I’ll tell you about some of the feelings these last four days have generated.

The opening film, Raging Grace (Paris Zarcilla, UK), drew me into the world of the central character and her daughter. It was about an undocumented Filipina woman (Joy, played by Max Eigenmann), frantically trying to raise money for forged UK papers before her presence in her employer’s home could be uncovered; and about other risks that emerged in that home. I couldn’t tell where the story was going at first, but it took time to establish the characters and their lifestyle before taking unexpected directions in both tone and plot. The real success of the film for me was in expressing the dual tensions of class and race felt by people in Joy’s position; a similar kind of social commentary to Nocebo, but with a little less of the pamphleteering attitude.

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Another picture of a class divide was given in To Fire You Come at Last (Sean Hogan, UK), the first film screened on Friday. Some would call it a long-form short, mind you, at less than 50 minutes; and this one was a folk horror set in the seventeenth century. I was immersed in an unfamiliar world again, sure, but the main feeling this time was an absolute goosepimply chill. To Fire was about four men carrying a coffin to its resting place, and features superstitions taken from actual British “corpse road” folklore. A great deal of it was set in the dark (they had a nearly three-hour walk, it seems), and although I’m never likely to believe in ghosts, it was filmed with such patient attention to every individual’s changing face, mood and posture that I could empathise with their beliefs by the end of the film.

Later on Friday, I caught the UK premiere of She is Conann (Bertrand Mandico, Belgium/France/Luxenbourg); a film completely untethered in time, in contrast. This was the one film that I gather was the most divisive amongst the Mayhem audience, with many unable to relate or finding it confusing, while others loved it. I’m one of the latter set; and while some appreciated the overview of Conann’s long life (“from slave to warrior”, as the blurb told me) as a transgressive deconstruction of gender expectations, for me, the colourful fantasy was dreamlike, and the theme that touched me was the power of aging. Ah well: we see what we can relate to, I guess, and I was fortunate that the nerve touched was a positive one.

Anyway, talking of time… there were two films which jointly made me laugh the most and impressed me with the ways their plots were structured, and one was very much about time. This was River (Junta Yamaguchi, Japan), which Mayhem’s listing described thus: “A twisted two minutes is masterfully manipulated in an amazing act of filmmaking ingenuity.” It came from the same minds as Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes, but isn’t quite as grounded in physics, or indeed as frantic, despite it being about a rural resort where a two-minute span of time is repeated for those present, many times. It is thought provoking and moving, and shows that changes can happen in a mere moment (or two minutes), rather than the full day of some famous romantic comedies; but it was funny above all else, in a clever way rather than farcical.

The other hilarious/impressive feature was Hundreds of Beavers (Mike Cheslik, US)… but I’m at risk of taking this piece too far away from our chosen genre of horror (and plenty of others have written about Beavers), so will take a quick diversion from the feature films to the shorts. Toast (Thomas Longstaff, UK) was the first little film in the Short Film Showcase and it had the entire audience shrieking with laughter within about a minute, watching a naïve slice of white bread smiling at his trip to the toaster. It is absolutely remarkable just how expressive animation can be sometimes. Find out for yourself: this one is on YouTube.

Honouring a whole spectrum of emotions, I need to tell you about a couple of things that brought me to tears. Firstly, another short film, The Body with No Face (Owen Tooth, UK), which presented just how a person can feel when they enter the healthcare system; they can lose sense of autonomy, with medical aides and other hospital staff often working around them without interacting, coming into the room at times without knocking or checking if the patient is awake. Characters with no faces in a short film with no dialogue meant the cold, clinical feeling of this representative patient’s world really hit home to me: I’ve been there. I would encourage you to take a look, especially if you work in health or social care: originally a BBC commission, this film is also available on YouTube.

The feature film that almost made me cry, a couple of times, was probably the one I knew least about before going in: The Animal Kingdom (Thomas Cailley, France). It’s set in a world very similar to the one we know, except there is a fairly new disease that results in people mutating into other species. I half expected a fantasy story, but on one hand this was gritty and down-to-Earth enough that the fantastical special effects felt real; and also the way the of infected were treated brought to mind paranoia from horror films such as Night Breed. The dilemma of whether their mutations should be allowed or reined in, as well as the way these “creatures” were spoken about by others hit a sensitive trans nerve; though I’m sure there were parallels with various kinds of “other” in this parable.

Night of the Hunted (Franck Khalfoun, USA/France) is an utterly different beast (excuse the pun or not as you choose), and this is the one that had me jump out of my seat with a yell, quite embarrassingly loud. It is a horror of the thriller variety, and Khalfoun knows how to make these, as we’ve previously seen in P2 and Maniac; like Maniac, this new one is also a remake, though of a less well-known Spanish film this time. Night of the Hunted takes place almost exclusively in a remote petrol station, off the main highway, in the early hours; hardly anyone is about except for a young woman and her lift stopping for fuel, and an unseen sniper. I saw a similar set up in Open 24 Hours a couple of years ago, and thought that was tense at the time, but this one beat it.

A film festival isn’t just made up of the films themselves, of course, but the crowd, the venue and other aspects of being there. So let me close this piece with some of those other kinds of highlights:

Kind and supportive cinema staff who helped when my mobility let me down.

Getting to meet a film director in person (John Adams, one of the team behind Where the Devil Roams), who I’d met a couple of times remotely.

Seeing and hearing the audience around me react as Loop Track unfolds.

The exhibition of horror art in the basement (yes, the basement).

Talking with other fans, and steadily being introduced to more.

There is the real bonus of a film festival: you have the opportunity to be surrounded by people who enjoy the same tastes as yourself, many of whom will love to talk about it. Even though starting conversations doesn’t come naturally to me, I felt at home as soon as I got to Mayhem in 2018, and I’ve become more settled into that crowd with every return visit. I have found online scenes and fandom families that I belong to in recent years, but this is the only “real life” one, and I shall miss it again now until same time next year.

PS if you’re tired of people talking in the cinema, go visit a film festival.

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