Flicks Month of Blood: Week One

Zoe:

October is Flicks’ MONTH OF BLOOD: Flicks will be exploring all things spooky and depraved with special horror-themed columns through the month of October, from apparitions to zombies. Here are four skin-crawling web-based videos to get you in the mood for terror. 

The Short Film:

I LOVE SARAH JANE (2009)

A young Mia Wasikowska stars as the eponymous Sarah Jane in this icky, blackly humorous tale of young love and cut-throat survival. This is one in a series of clever and rather sadistic shorts by Australian group Blue Tongue films. Their films aren’t strictly in the horror genre, but they are plenty gross and unsettling.  Check out the rest on their YouTube channel here.

The Documentary:

INTERVIEW WITH A CANNIBAL (2012)

Note: there is no content warning or restriction on this video, but it contains graphic crime scene photographs and descriptions of sexual violence. Please take this into account before watching this video.

VICE may be pretty obnoxious and questionable most of the time, but they do produce some darn fine web documentaries now and then. Japanese murderer Issei Sagawa describes his incredibly disturbing and morally vacant world with an off-putting gusto, but the details of how his crimes were commodified by a muck-raking entertainment industry are more frightening than the work of any individual psychopath.

The Found Footage:

SPOOKY CAMPING IN VERMONT (2010)

The ever-popular found footage genre has found a suitably warm place to nest and breed in the complex tunnels of the interwebs, where amateur works like the sprawling Slender Man epic by user MarbleHornets and the multitude of videos composing the “strange sounds” phenomenon can grow to mutant proportions. Set among the piles and piles of poorly produced footage are occasional gems, such as the inventive multimedia mystery that is ducttape36’s Vermont camping series. Originally a thread on Reddit (you can find the first thread with links to the rest of the series here), this creepy journey into the forest became an interactive puzzle using video clues, including the inspired touch of SSTV codes that were unscrambled by users. Ducttape36’s videos are unique for amateur found footage film because he allows nothing to happen for long periods of time. The footage is incredibly natural, even boring at times—which allows the scary bits to be all the more real. The veracity of ducttape36’s story is doubtful, but the fun of the mystery is enough to make up for the illusion. 

The New Folklorist:

THE RAT KING (2011)

Canadian YouTuber theLittleFears’ somnolent voice murmurs bedtime stories to send you off into an uneasy sleep in the warm blue glow of your computer screen. TheLittleFears weaves strange tales, from the urban mythology of 1970s television program “Candle Cove,” to the fictional message-board posts of a Catholic-school kindergarten teacher in a precise, surreal style reminiscent of a less precious Joey Comeau.