October 31 days of Halloween movie challenge 2023 (+ other spooky media)

No fucking around, no Leprechaun gimicks this time. But I did also do stuff other than watch films and I'd like to talk about them too.

1. Godkiller - Edgey AF "action comic" with a shockingly good voicecast for something so trashy. My inner teenager enjoyed it immensly.
2. Baghead - Duplas brothers pseduo horror. It's fine but not great. Not a patch on Creep or any of their subsequent work.
3. Odd Noggins - I stuck this on at random after browsing Prime for stuff. Looked like it might be a fun low budget indie horror, and I was right about most of that. I guess they had a lot of fun making it but it wasn't funny and unless seeing pretty normal looking middle aged people bone is supposed to be scary, not scary.
4. Where The Dead Go To Die - one of the great works of "disturbing media", bad 90s / 00s CGI animation doing some really gross stuff. Like a lot of extreme media (eg, the novel Cows), I don't know how far the tongue is in the cheek on this one, but I feel like they are self aware to some extent. Kind of reminds me of The Shivering Truth but with a hard X rating.
5. Inseminoid - 80s "classic". Eh, it's fine.
6. Captain Kronos: Vampire Hunter - Rare re-watch. I recall seeing this as a child and rather liking it. Its great, Hammer doing a rare original IP and it all (script in particular) is just better and goes far harder than they typically did back then.
7. There's Nothing Out There - self aware po-mo 90s indie horror that supposedly Wes Craven stole the ideas from for Scream, or at least thats what's implied  in the short Copycat (also on Mubi). Jury is well out on that one. It's fine.
8. Talk To Me - recent A24 darling that is doing the rounds, this years St Maud and about as devisive. I really liked it. Good premise, well executed lots of creepyness and some good scares.
9. Cobweb - Another new one, great stuff. Creepy as balls and lots of good scares and gruesome kills. Homelander is in this as the Da and he's grrrrreat!
10. Soft and Quiet - Actually more of a thriller than a horror but for that it has some of the most genuinely terrifying characters you'll ever see on screen. Nazi Karens! Karenazis! The horror, the horror....
11. Dawn Of The Dead - I watched the long version on Youtube that has everything in it from all the various cuts. Even though that's not a version any professional editor or Romero intended to put out, it still was an incredibly enjoyable experience that mostly holds up really well.
12. Moon Garden - Oh, I love a good dark fairy tale horror. Great effects for what was apparently a really tiny budget. The child actor that plays the lead was brilliant.
13. VHS 1985 - Fine. I've come not to expect a whole lot from the VHS franchise and this delivered. Nice degraded media and glitch aesthetic-y stuff, good atmosphere in some sections but a lot of the individual stories and performances weren't up to much.
14. Freaky - I genuinely enjoyed this. Absolutely delivered as anything you could want from a horror slasher comedy and wrung all you can from the premise. My only regret is not watching it the day before on the actual Friday The 13th
15. Medusa - Disappointing. Didn't go anywhere interesting, do much with the premise and no good scares or kills. The social / policical commentary was all there and was all well and good but it didn't tie the elements together in a satisfying way.

16. Bad Things - Queer horror film. Not great, felt like they were trying to do elevated / post-horror but didn't land any of the punches thrown.
17. The Lodge - Oh this was much better. Simmilar to bad things, elevated subtle vibes-y horror but this had a lot more teeth and doesn't take long getting right in your face and under your skin. I guessed the ending really early on but it delivered so brutally and brilliantly that it didn't deminish it one iota.
18. Invasion Of The Body Snatchers - the one from the 70s with Donald Sutherland. Re watch, haven't seen it since I was wee. Still great, brilliant script, good performances, creepy, eerie vibes and good scares.
19. Perfect Blue (rewatch) - One of the greatest, one of my absolute all time favourites. Kon knew how to do layers with visual storytelling and here in one of the stand out animé debut features of all time deploys all that to brilliant effect.
20. Paranorman - nothing says halloween like a bit of creepy stop-motion. Brilliant, if not quite as great as some of Liaka's other work
21. The Guardian - William Friedkin died earlier this year so instead of watching The Exorcist like someone normal I watched this bonkers (in a fun way) evil nanny movie he did in the 80s. Nicely atmospheric and a great ending.
22. Husera: The Bone Woman - really interesting and well done LGBTQ+ horror from mexico. A woman settling down into a nice comp-het lifestyle with a baby and opposite-gender life partner is haunted and stalked by her own queerness, with some preggo body-horror thrown in there.
23. No One Will Save You - good creepy alien-home-invasion horror with great atmosphere and genuinely creepy SFX. The whole "no dialogue, just visual story telling" thing really worked. Should have been called Alien Vs Cottage-core.
24. The Last Broadcast (rewatch) - the original and by far the superior of the early FF Horrors of the late 90s / early 00s. I love how the scariest thing about it is how prescient it is of the modern post internet cultural landscape considering when it was made and released.
25. M3GAN - Creepy evil doll robot, using the uncanny valley intentionally for horror is a masterstroke tbf. A lot of fun.
26. The Raven (rewatch) - Vincent Price, Boris Karloff and Peter Lorre in the intentionally funny Poe adaption. Classic tbf, the Wizards Duel at the end really gave me a hankering to play Magic The Gathering again.
27. Good Madam - I always like to try to get something in from each continent when I'm doing these. This Peele-esque satirical chiller from South Africa with dialogue mostly in Xhosa was maybe a bit more effective as a bit of social / political commentary / exploration of post-apartheid race relations than as a horror film. Good tho all the same.
28. The Sect - early 90s Giallo, produced by the don himself Dario Argento. A lot of fun bloody kills early on (and one really good one involving a rabbit at about 1hr 30 in) but its a bit too long and the plot meanders all over the 2nd act. It's fine.
29. Titane (rewatch) - One of the best films (in general, any genre) of recent times,best film of 2021 and in the top 5 of the decade so far. Uncompromising, visceral and has some extremely gnarly scenes, yet surprisingly sweet and wholesome. It's about Faahmly!
30. When Evil Lurks - New horror from Argentina that is getting a bit of a rep as one of the best of the year. I can see why, it is unrelentingly bleak like The Dark And The Wicked but amped up, and throw a bunch of creepy murderous children into the mix and you have a heady brew there. Brutal in the best way.
31. Evil Dead 2: Dead By Dawn (rewatch) - Always nice to round these off with an old favourite. The king Bruce Campbell riffing further on the plot and lore of the original, with a lot of inspired camera work, impressive practical effects and genuinely funny physical comedic acting. Still one of the level best in the genre.

Other things:

TV-

I watched the TV series Castlevania: Nocturne and Fall Of The House of Usher on Netflix. These are both updates to long running prestige Netflix projects, Nocturne being a new adventure set a couple of centuries after the original series and Fall' being a new Mike Flanaghan project with multuple returning cast members from his previous works for the channel. Both were excellent.

Nocturne updated the stylish dark action fantasy of the previous series to a different time period - this time 1792 during the bourgeois revolution with native-Americans, Haitian characters and the egeneral theme of revolution and counter-revolution as an important constituent part of the story. Great writing, complext character dynamics, bitching animated action and aesthetic in general. Can't wait for the rest of it to drop.

Fall of the House of Usher was a somewhat silly but very well produced modern riff by Flanaghan on the Edgar Allen Poe canon of work. It also throws in a bit of contemporary anti-corporate discourse and the main family is based to a degree on the IRL horrors of the Sackler family's empire of pain. Still, its not brilliant satire and best enjoyed if one doesn't take it too seriously. Good acting and writing, some fun kills and it does a lot more with the source material than say The Haunting did with the Shirley Jackson corpus.

Books-

I also read a bunch of horror fiction. I'm more of a sci-fi and fantasy head. As much as I like my stuff dark straight up horror doesn't generally do a lot for me. But this being the season I decided to get stuck into some horror literature relevant to my interests.

Last Ones Left Alive by Sarah Davis-Goff - A queer, feminist and Irish take on The Walking Dead post-Zombpocalypse type story. It was alright.

Your Body Is Not Your Body - an anthology of body horror / weird fiction by Trans and other LGTBQ+ writers. As you'd expect from such a tome, even the stories that weren't that great were packed with interesting ideas and perspectives. 

Revival by Stephen King - A relatively recent one and supposedly one of his best. I wasn't overly enamoured with it. A lot of the emotional core of the story is predicated on Boomer nostalgia. Where it touched on themes and ideas more relevant to my experience and interests I didn't think it hit the mark. The ending fell a bit flat, but probably because I'd already had it a bit too hyped-up.

Never Whistle At Night - An anthology of dark fiction from Native American authors. As with the previous short story collection, if you want effective horror you go to people that have some serious IRL shit to process and this one also delivers. Even the stories that are not as good as horror as some of the rest have a lot of great ideas in there.

The Shee by Joe Donnelly - Gloriously dumb, old school mass market paperback horror from the 90s with a bit of an Oirish-y twist. Archaeologists digging up a New Grange style passage tomb accidentally unleash The Morrigan, which for the purposes of this novel is a female beasty with It skillset and MO on a small Irish fishing village on the Connaght coast. It was very much of it's time, has a lot of old school misogyny, ableism and ridiculously stereotyped Irish characters but it's fun and dumb enough that it's difficult to take proper offence. It has some deliciously gnarly kills that lean quite heavily into the monstrous feminine imagery, sexual and maternal stuff being a running theme. Personally I found it incel-y enough to be laughable. It also has a little bit of 'troubles' discourse, just to really "Irish" it up, which is again borderline offensive - like one could imagine a Garth Merenghi story saying all Irelands woes from time immemorial through to an gorta mór and everything in the last century is down to a witches curse. Anyway, 'tis enjoyable for what it is but best not to take it too seriously.

So that was my October. I did also get out to a few gigs, saw Fear Factory and guests in Belfast on the 30th, which was a lot of fun. I still have other stuff on, films I "aquired" or ermarked on streaming that I didn't get to, and a showing of the silent horror Häxan from the 20s with a live orchestra to look forwads to on Thursday. Spooky season is by no means over yet, it never really ends to be fair.

Supersonic 2023

Supersonic Festival has been very much on my festival bucket list for some time. I don’t remember the first time exactly that I came across one of the line-ups and thought “damn, this is everything I’m really into, I need to make this happen some year”, I mean like literally I could have been any time between 2012 and the one they were supposed to do in 2020, the weird psycho-temporal-distortion effects of the lockdown now mean many things prior to that point are a mash. But at any rate It was on my radar for some while but being in an unfamiliar city over the water and all the hassle with flying and general interest but not to the point of being arsed doing anything about it of my general friend circle has just led to it getting pushed off on the long finger until this year.

Why now? Could just be consciousness of getting older and knowing I might well not be able to do this forever. It could also have been getting to experience the festival in the odd-parasocial way that I did when they had the lockdown live-stream which if not exactly delivering the festival experience in its fullest was still very enjoyable and was able to deliver the vibe and ethos. I would like to think I would have gone that year anyway if not for the plague. Lankum were on the line up and as already a bit of a fan I was intrigued to see what they would do in a bit less restrained setting than the seated CQAF gig I’d been to before.

So this year when I was looking at stuff to do I put the word out I was if not committed then at least tossing up the possibility of going on my own, but of the people I got in touch with, I did get a bite. My mate John who is not on socials and I see maybe once or twice a year pre pandemic, and since him and his wife Tara had a kid and moved out of Dublin during lockdown, not even as much as tha. But he’s a huge Godflesh fan, really liked the look of the rest of the proceedings and committed to the full weekend with the Mrs joining us for the Saturday.

First hurdle of actually getting there ended up being a wee bit of a melt, airport delays, rail strikes and traffic accidents had me getting into Birmingham a little later than expected, then the process of getting settled meant that I didn’t quite get off to the venue, which was a very short walk from our accommodation until the early evening and I missed a few of the first bands.

Or I should say “Venues” – as in the plural. The festival took place between two buildings, one big space for the main room in the 7SVN with all the bigger acts and The Mill, which had mutiple floors, trader room, outdoor food court (which all looked amazing, smelt unreal and were reasonably priced but I couldn’t engage with personally), second venue and a nice roof top garden with its own sound system and DJs. As with Arc Tangent the crack was one room on, one room off and set up between sets, with Merch tables being manned at the back of each room if you wanted to support the act that were just on. Having timed it to get from the main stage to the first floor of the mill where the other one was it was literally just a couple of minutes but that did involve crossing a live road (with high vis wearing festival security playing the part of lollipop man, without themed Bloody-Teardrop lollipops unfortunately, possibly due to legal reasons) and you had to finish your drink as you weren’t allowed to take alcohol between the two rooms (probably also for legal reasons tbh though it could well have just been ruse to sell more IPAs 😊).

 

That was certainly all a bit odd but the festival does host a series of talks and have referred to the struggle of running a small underground community festival with a genuine radical ethos in a rapidly gentrifying area of a city, venue insecurity and other practical effects, something I know even big commercial festivals here struggle with, so I suppose those wee things are part of the crack and give the whole proceedings a bit of character.

So before getting into the bands and days as stuff, just general impressions of the festival itself are incredibly positive. Everything I could have hoped for a small boutique underground with a range of noise adjacent music from chill meditative ambient to the most ridiculously heavy rock and metal to full on fist-pump Bangface-appropriate rave. Just enough of everything to give it a bit of variety so you really appreciate all the individual pieces in context and that whole through line of noise and general playfulness giving it a consistency too. The crowd was, as with ATG, as with Bangface these days and I’m guessing most spaces where the genuinely cool people who get the crack congregate to be fair, politically radical, alternative, queer, feminist, trans-inclusive, friendly, approachable. The vibe checker app on my smartphone was going crazy all weekend

So, first thing I managed to catch on Friday was the last bit of local post-punk outfit Total Luck. Great start to the proceedings as the heaviness and liveliness where what I needed at that point to dust off  the cobwebs and get myself moving after all that travelling. We missed whatever was on next in favour of a bit of exploring and seeing what the layout of the whole thing was. We did get to see Deerhoof, the Friday headliner and something I was particularly looking forwards to. Lively, eclectic guitar based music, constantly transitioning between styles and tying together with J-Pop vocals tying everything together. A complete blast beginning to end.

After that a bit more mooching about the venue before back to the main room for Hey Colossus, who I wasn’t mad familiar with before but knew where right up my street from the second I heard the deep, menacing, Echo(and the Bunnymen)-y gothic drone of the first tune. After that, back to the mill for live analogue face-melt industrial techno 2-piece Giant Swan. Having been suitably pumped by that we finished on the main stage for Infinity Knives and Brian Ennals brining some sick bass-heavy alt hip-­hop.

Tempted as I we were to continue the night either with the small gaggle of sound folk we’d got chatting with in the smoking area or to book up to a gig being out on by one of the extended Hard Crew fam, all the travelling and festivities was catching up with us and we had to call it quits.

Saturday, John stalled at the flat waiting for his partner, who was also experiencing some of the travel woes I’d been subject to the day before. I had a nice afternoon bate’in about on my own through Digbeth doing a bit of exploring on my way to the other-other venue, an art gallery a couple of streets over from the rest of the stuff that hosted the talks, pub quiz and film showings (which I went to) in the afternoons. Digbeth strikes me as like the local Brum version of Camden or the couple of genuinely cool bits off Royal Avenue here, CQ, Union St. etc. Lots of cool wee spots, a complex with an Arcade Bar next to a Boardgame Café, next to a cinema bar, some small independent art galleries and workshops, loads of absolutely phenomenal graff and street art all over the place. I got to see a showcase of music videos and short video art projects from Ipecac, Mike Patton’s own indie label. 

 
First music I caught was the hardcore punk group Blind Eye in The Mill. As it was early in the day the front of the stage was nice and roomy so I had a lot of space to jump about in, which I definitely made the most of. Black’s Myths was a very different energy, lots of drone-doom goodness with a bit of jazz drumming to give you something to move to, no breaks between songs just a constant roll that you can get yourself into properly. After that I saw Ashenspire, who I’d had the pleasure of seeing do their queer anarchist blackened jazz-metal at ATG a couple of weeks ago and once again enjoyed the hell out of before nipping out a little early to get a good spot for Taqbir.

Taqbir are a riot girl group from Morocco in North Africa who perform with the full face Niqāb - for personal safety moreso that religious observation as their radical feminist and queer-inclusive messaging in their songs puts them in the line of fire of conservative groups back home and in general. Punk at its rawest from a circumstance where its ethos is at its most urgent, it had an edge on it that you just don’t get in hardcore in the occident where the innate revolutionary politics are less urgent. They played a short set, as befitting of the genre, but were a definite highlight of the evening. After that I caught a little bit of writer and Oxbow frontman Eugene S Robinson being interviewed in the dealer room by an old festival friend who I’d had a lovely time catching up with for the first time IRL in near ten years. Between that and having to nip back to the gaff for food I missed the only thing I am in retrospect incredibly gutted at missing all weekend, Divide and Dissolve who apparently wrecked the place with one of the nosiest, loudest and generally memorable performances of the weekend.

By the time I got back John and Tara were on site and despite being a bit worse the wear for all the travelling and whatnot we managed to get in the headliners Godflesh on their loudest and most abrasive form I’ve ever had the pleasure of catching. 

We saw DJ Bus Replacement Service who was less weird and more straight up doof than I was expecting, deviating from the relentless techno for a bit of bassline and a censored cut of DJ Assault’s classic Ass and Titties, all while being supported from the sidelines by her partner Surgeon. That was just like a little slice of Bangface right in the middle of the fest, complete with inflatables going off all over the room and general silly fun vibe.

Then Backxwash finishing the main stage. It was actually the inclusion of Backxwash to the lineup for their UK debut that had made me get my arse in gear about committing to going this year. She’s an artist that I’d fallen in love with over the lockdown when I’d had a bit more time to explore and indulge my passion for musical exploration. Aggressively queer alternative hip hop with elements of industrial noise, black metal and samples of back radical thinkers and cultural figures, X, Davis, Nina Simone etc. and contemporary hip-hop rhythms. A very heady and unique brew, brilliantly executed and clearly loving having the opportunity to get over and do their thing in front of such and appreciative crowd.

The Art

Again, opportunities to party after were there but the excitement of the day and being middle aged AF over here had us all calling discretion the better part of valour and calling it for the night.

The Sunday again has us over at the other-other stage after seeing Tara off I the early afternoon for the Pub Quiz, which we stupidly didn’t think to register for early and had to miss. All good though as that meant more time to see around Digbeth for us, John exploring the culinary pleasures of the area and me getting to actually have a crack at the arcade bar and check out some more of the art. 

Seems like it was a good weekend for exploration in Birmingham. There was a big open air complex next door, the courtyard and stage of which could be seen from the smoking area, had a Reggae festival on that day. I jokingly suggested to one of the security staff that they could turn the speaker in that part of the terrace off to let anyone who had a mind to watch. That suggestion was laughed off politely with a little finger wagging, I was being serious tbh.

First act was Jessica Moss, playing a solo with Violin and Loop pedal / vocal looping effects. Very different, very cool, first time seeing something like that myself since Sonorities last year.

After that I got to see a but of the Supersonic Mass, a quasi-religious ceremony lead by an MC with a bannered parade from the Mill to the 7SVN, with a large one with the names of every act to play the festival in the last 20 years at the head and a ritualistic recitation thereof. That was followed by British folk artists Shovel Dance Collective, Silvermoth, Mark Wagner bringing some ritualistic doom and a quick trip back to the gaff to food-up. Me and John had no big plans for the day up to seeing Lankum later on so just hopped room to room exploring. Yeah and remember what I said earlier about the Reggae festival next door, we got lured into the terrace with some sick beats courtesy of the Tropical Wreck collective and guess what, speaker at far corner disconnected and mostly bar and security staff and one or two punters, shortly to include ourselves, vibing to the ragga dancehall across the road 😊 ‘I toul yiz, didn’ I? 

After that bit of excitement back down to see Jessica Moss, the violinist from earlier in the main room this time with Big Brave playing a very different but equally impressive set.

Moving didn’t bear thinking about because shortly it would be time for Sunday headliners, Irish trad artists Lankum. For those who don’t know, and shame on you if you are in that cohort, Lankum were previously a two piece, “Lynched” after the surname of the brothers Darragh and Ian Lynch who were well known in the underground metal scene in Ireland for being the two lads who liked to play random trad songs while partying after shows. Now after a name change considering the possibility of taking off in places where their band name has certain connotations that they’d rather not be associated with, and being joined by multi instrumentalists Cormac MacDiarmada and Radie Peat, the latter of who adds her own incredibly raw and beautiful Sean Nós vocalisation to the mix, are now Lankum. They have been tearing up the local festival and gig circuit at and near home, and now 3 masterful albums deep into the project are getting genuine international notoriety. I have seen them live before and they’re never anything short of special but in this context being both in England and yet in a place long a centre for Irish immigration, so also basically on home turf it was just mind-blowing. There’s something about what they do that touches something incredibly primal like in general but especially if you’re Irish, with noise-y droned out versions of old standards, eg, The Wild Rover – the absolute pinnacle of a cheesy over played trad tune that everyone and their granda knows like the back of their hand through sheer cultural osmosis yet still given such a squalid and real life by them as to sound brand new and fit neatly alongside their own contemporary murder-suicide ballads about the metal health crisis in modern Ireland and living on the breadline in post-crash Dublin. Myself and my mate both had actual hairs on the back of our necks fully up and tears of national pride and many more complex emotions in our eyes all through it.

Now we’d have thought that after that we’d be too emotionally drained to get another real transcendent moment of musical appreciation out of the last couple of hours of the night, and yet… being tired though not quite done yet we made a bate to the Mill for the last time, to grab my coat from the cloak room and stick our heads around the door if only to check out the last artists on the second stage. ‘Tis as well we did for that turned out to be an absolutely blinding alt hip hop crew Algiers. This was a two piece with the beats having a particularly 80s vintage retro-synthwave tip to them and and MC with a really interesting range including blues-y sing-rapping, Saul Williams-esque lyricism and politically conscious bars. Some of it really banged too, like proper rave breaks.

Re-invigorated we did get down for Avalanche Kaito, lively mathy Afro rock, Zappa-esque compositional weirdness, traditional West-African instrumentation, Griot vocals and a bit of call-response. We were lucky enough to bump into some of the incredibly cool folks we’d got chatting to on the Friday on the dancefloor too and it was a great end to the night and the event.

Overall, as I hope I’ve been able to convey here, I had the absolute time of it. For reasons I’ll not get into, this has been a tough year all round, the general shittyness of the weather over the summer since the start of July being only the least among many things to complain of. So this was a well deserved bit of release and a chance to engage with communities and spaces that are important to me and are part of what helps feed the soul. Glad I got there at last and I hope that this small offering of my efforts can help feed back into it a little. I’d love to get back maybe as a regular part of my yearly cycle of things but time will tell how able I am for that in the future.

I will also note that this weekend was also when the first part of the new Adventure Time spin off dropped and I had been looking forwards to getting into that when I got back, which I did and was all I could have hoped a continuation of one of my absolute favourite things ever with the complexity tuned up just a little and now aimed at a more self consciously adult audience who’d grew up with the series over the last decade could ever be. So I’ve had my mind-hole well fed to the point of being stuffed and satisfied and feel a bit more ready for whatever this increasingly shaky and unpredictable future we all find ourselves in may hold. You can’t ask more from a long weekend than that really, can you?

 

ArcTanGent 2023

 Ok, so to not bury the lead journo-style: main thing is ArcTanGent was great and I can indeed still hack a 3 day Camping festival. This is my first since Life 2014, I have broken both legs and swore off them since then, but when I saw the lineup for this I knew I had to make the effort to get over. So I did.

First thing I'll say that as festivals go, I thought it was fantastically well done. The production, curation, provision of site services and essentials, cleanslyness and usefulness of the bathroom facilties, the pre pitched tent I sprung for, and just the general vibe and atmosphere were all great. I was impressed with the dedication to being enviromentally conscious, it was weird buying tinned water (particularly since the design on the stuff at the bar was very Repo Man esque) but it was good that the place wasn't covered in plastic.

Also for a Metal festival, generally lefty AF, aside apparently a few boneheads who turned up for Heilung who I personally didn't see but heard about from a few people. Hielung themselves are conscsious by the nature of what they do inevitably attract a bit of that sort of thing but have distanced themselves from it publicly to the extent that they can. Other than that, I saw plenty of antifa patches on peoples stuff, lots of leftist, feminist, queer and trans artists and just people about the place in general. 

Pure family vibe too. Like there wasn't a play pen or stuff specifically for kids, but there was a good few babies and actual childer knocking about. Not many but enough that it all felt wierdly wholesome. I saw some folk with their kids (always with ear protectors) up on their shoulders at the main stage. Parenting goals tbf.

I found the way they ran the thing interesting. Everything started really early, first bands on 11ish, and everything runs up to 11pm, after which there is a "Silent Disco" where everyone who wants to can go to a stage and listen to DJ sets being played through headphones. Presumably this is to get around local sound rules and regs that dogged Boomtown the last couple of years I was there. Not the worst way to placate the NIMBYs if that's what you need to do, beats turning the sound down on the main stages after 11pm.

The stages were all pretty close together, had they all been on full time they'd have noise polluted each other out, but with this being basically all bands and stuff that required a set up they staggered the set times so at any given time one stage was on they'd be prepping for the next act on the other stage. I'm guess that's probably relatively normal for that type of festival but I'd personally not seen it before so yeah. Cool. Also made it easy to have a wee snoop about the different stages if you'd a mind to.

What I got up to: Thursday, flight got delayed getting from Belfast to Bristol and the coach into town took a bit longer than I had thought from the (admittedly somewhat rushed) research I had done into the transpot situ so I ended up getting charged dear for some of the camping equiptment I had to get from the last camp shop open in Brizzle by the time I got there (which means I need to do a few more of these things to get the use out of them, oh well....) and I didn't get to do some of the shopping I had planned which meant I had to rely on the then unknown quantity of making do with whatever I could get onsite. It also meant that by the time I got up to the site and got my shit together I had missed practically everything on the first day. No Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs for me unfortunately. If I'm back I reckon I'll need to look into arranging things a bit better with that in mind. It wasn't a complete washout, I did get to see a good bit of Converge who were headlining the mainstage and most of my first big discovery of the weekend Straight Girl who had played the wednesday and was covering for someone who had pulled out, apparently due to getting stuck on the UK border. I had literally just nipped out of Converge to have a quick snoop at the other stages to see what they were like, not intending to really be away for too long when I heard bass, breaks and beats coming from up the hill. Unreal, and short, enough that I caught the latter half of Converge. After that I was wrecked after all the running around so I booked and got my head down. 

Friday I had a pleasant morning catching up with the neighbors (a girl from here and her mate from down South, nice!). Made frieds with a bunch of sound lads from Cardiff, who I'll refer to as 'Jeff's Mates'. I got to see most or all of Joliette, Ashenspire and CLT DRP and really liked them. I saw And So I Watch You From Afar, actually for the first time live, now feel like a bit of a nob for not having done so before. I saw Pet Brick again who I'd had the absolute best time watching at Bangface and gave it absolute stacks, probably the most lively I was all weekend. I didn't get drawn into the mosh pit but I was sorely tempted. Big highlights from the friday tho, not unexpectedly as they were along with Igorrr the big draws for me of the whole thing; Swans and Hielung. Swans was just darkness,vibe and intensity. I got complete full-body frission. It was great. Hielung was just on another level. For those that don't know, they basically do a sort of reimagining of Norse/German pagan shamanic rituals using costumes, instruments etc based on the type of things they have in the historical record or found in Iron Age burial sites from Northern Europe and a good bit beyond (but that's not important and they're not going for full dilligent authenticity). The stage craft is really elaborate too. Off all the stuff I saw, they'd be the only thing that if someone put them on in the Waterfront or something I'd take my parents to see them.

That was the day of the really horrible weather (in the middle of f'ing August, this is what global warming is for the UK btw) and it blew me right into my tent past any feeling towards sociability on my part. And I was just knackered tbh. 

Saturday, having actually just had a really good rest I was intent on making the best of the last day. I caught A Burial At Sea, mathrock group Land Wars (Davitt / Parnell reference? one of the guys is from Cavan so maybe). After that I caught some nice queer, gothy-gazey act called Cultdreams and bumped into my mate Big Mike at the end. He took me to see Gggolddd, cracking dark, moody synth/trip-hop. We split and I had saw Grub Nap for a bit of a change of pace, 2 lads from Leeds doing aggy Sludge-core. Great stuff. Simmilarly the Callous Daoboys were a lot of fun and really heavy, Rolo Tomasi, Health and Loathe were all awesome in different ways and for different reasons. Deafhaven were great, aside from the technical difficulties which I didn't mind so much but I could see people who are more emotionally invested in them getting upset over, especially since they were doing their iconic Sunbather album beginning to end.

Absolute stand out of the day though, again predictably, was Igorrr. I love Igorrr, have been into them since back when he was releasing on NI's own Acroplane and Ad Noiseum. Saw him play a set at Bangface 2016. Seeing him blow up on the metal circuit and bring in more live elements to the shows since then has been an absolute pleasure. This time he had the full band, him on his hardware, his live drummer, guitarist and an opera singer providing vocals going through mostly stuff off the last two albums. he opened with a wee bit of breakcore and finished off again just by himself banging out the glitches, bass and drum breaks. 

I ended up only seeing a wee bit of Devin Townsend, actually bumped into a guy I met in his own house last week after Kneecap, ended up hanging with him, his brother and their mate who I'd been talking to earlier at the start of Igorrr, then finished the weekend hanging with Jeff's mates, and other people who came around, including two lads from Lambeg, one of who recognised me from activist stuff back in the day and grew up in the street opposite my house, and his mate who was at Lagan literally just as I left. This country is a village.

Silly crack was had. It was a good end to a good day and the festival in general. I had a great time, could see myself coming back if they pull out another lineup like this years that just has a lot of stuff on it I really like. Or that could prove to be a fluke, we'll see. Would be good to get a crowd up for it if I do go back.

Halloween 31 Movies 31 Days challenge 2022

Reposted for posterity from the Your Take Is Excrement sub-Reddit

 

Doing this now for the third year in a row, should be wee buns since I'm currently "between employment" so have the free time to do this.  Thought it might be fun to post here about it and update the list through the month as I go. Anyone else feel free to join in.

No real rules, just 1 movie per day on average of Horror, Spooky or adjacent media.

1. The Transfiguration - Mubi. Like the film Martin but also a hood movie? Fine for what it is, not enough bite for my tastes tho.
2. Mad God - Shudder. A 90s alt-metal video, all bleakness and stop motion grim looking wet puppets, but feature length.
3. We're all Going The The World's Fair - Shudder. I hear our May is in this, will be looking out for you a chara (and not just so I can do a "Di Caprio Pointing at Screen in OUATIH"-meme face). - just watched it now and she was indeed, all to brief of a cameo but good to see. This was great, maybe not for everyone but I really liked it.
4. The Gate - Physical. 80s childrens horror. When I started watching it I thought I hadn't seen before but bits of it rang a bell with me. I think I must have saw it as an actual child myself. This was amazing. Good one to watch with children if you're babysitting over halloween or you want something to scare younger relatives with that's not too fucked up (or just watch The Fly, as one of my mates Grannies did with her when she was 8).
5. The Snake Girl and the Silver-Haired Witch - Shudder. Another children's horror film, but its Japanese so its pretty messed up anyway!
6. Hausu - BFI Player. Rewatch. Yeah if you know of this film its as bat-shit as you've heard. Had forgotten how much of a weird unspoken sexual undercurrent there was to everything. If you've never seen it, I would heartily reccomend, its just good.
7. Bug - Physical. William Friedkindoing a slow burn psychological horror about a very different type of possession. This kind of defies genre, if you liked Killer Joe this shares a lot of simmilarities.
8. Hellbenders - Shudder. Weird little indie horror made by a family who seem to do everything in house with just a couple of outside collaborators. It's good, I liked it a lot.
9. Vampire's Kiss - Prime. 80s Nicholas Cage MF'ers!
10. Uncle Sam - Shudder. Wow, the anti-militarism subtext in this isn't remotely subtle, and I love it!
11. Leprechaun - Prime. It has been brought to my attention that there are loads of these and most of them are available on streaming for free. Am I enough of a masochist to actually watch all of them? How bad do thse things get and how much will they grate on my sensibilities as a some time Irish folklorist? Will I need to get the 'Ra on somebody by the time I'm finished or wha? There's only one way to find out.
12. Leprechaun 2: LA Leprechaun - Prime. Excrement mostly. Some great moments though and it did make me laugh a bit more than the first one.
13. Leprechaun 3: Las Vegas Go Bragh! - Prime. The worst one yet. They change writer and director each time so far and the lore and rules of what a Leprachaun is / does varys and has to be restablished film to film. The last one they seem to have at least consulted a reference book as to what the original fairy lore was but that's all gone out the window. The tone is remarkably consistent though which I feel we can put down almost exclusively to Warwick Davis's performance. This one sucked because its attempts at humour fumble hard, there were a few clever and genuinely humourous touches in the last couple that made them at least entertaining are just gone. The potentially funny but where they rip off a scene from Faust (weird dark superhero thing from Yuzna, would love to see that get a big DCEU/MCU expensive CGI adaption) would have been better if they'd gone all in, they pussy out of other stuff but that's the most egregious. Most people stop at this point but I can see why, but the next one he's in space, then the next two are in "da Hood", and those are the one's I'm here for.
14. Leprechaun 4: In Space - Prime. Getting well into the "so bad they're good" region, this is as ridiculous as the title would suggest. Dodgy PS1-cut scene CGI, nonsensicle script, again changing the lore, but again held together barely by Warwick Davis haming the absolute balls out of it and the film leaning into its own silliness.
15. Taking a break from the Leprechaun franchise to watch the new Hellraiser - Hulu. I liked it. The first films were about ilicit sex, this was very much using the lore of the franchise to talk about addiction. I liked how the main baddie amongst the humans was a Jeffery Epstein character, like lets face it Epstein Island definitely had a room with a bunch of those puzzel boxes in it.
16. Leprechaun 5: In Da Hood - Prime. Jesus Ice, money's money but fucking hell like. He's about the only good thing in it and all his scenes really pop, the rest of it?  That finale? Like I'm no one to judge if its too daft to be actually transphobic or if its just really really transphobic but its definitely, something... I'm kind of sorry I started this now.
17. Malevolent - Netflix. I needed to give myself a break from Leprechaun, life's too short. This has been on my Netflix list for a while. I thought it was good, funny to see Imelda Staunton playing against Florence Pugh before she blew up. Nicely creepy where it needed to be. Solid.

           
At this point I watched Shock Treatment for the first time, the Rocky Horror Picture Show sequel. It was good, the girl from Phantom of The Paradise who plays Janet in it in particular. but it is not in any way Horror / Spooky so I'm not counting it.

18. The Sadness - Shudder. That one went hard.
19. Saloum - Shudder. Oh thanks be to god, glob and baby jesus, Leprechaun Back 2 Tha Hood is not on streaming and this can finally end now. When I do this I usually like to hit each continent at least once, Europe and Asia generally being very over represented. This is a recent one from Africa, its on Shudder and its good. Set up better than the pay off / horror stuff, though the monsters were good and the SFX used to put them together was unique. Could have been a bit scarier but it wasn't bad.
20. Livid - Physical. Creepy gothic fairytale horror, from the people that did À l'intérieur, though it isn'y nearly as gross or squicky as that one.
21. Slugs - Shudder. I am low level phobic of squiggly things, worms, slugs, snails, leeches etc, since childhood. A couple of halloweens ago I went on a quest to fins something that could still effect my jaded sensibilities, watched August Underground and a bunch of New French Extremity I hadn't seen before, watched some good and interesting stuff but aside from August Underground trilogy I didn't see much that really got to me. This film is squicking me out hard, this might be the grossest thing for my set of triggers I've seen since then. Well done.
22. The Similars - Physical. Latin America this time, a particularly Mexi take on a classic Twilight Zone episode. Leans right hard into its own sillyness. Good but more fun than disturbing.
23. Burnt Offerings - Prime. Interesting take on the old dark house yarn. My primary interest in this was that it starred Oliver Reed and had Bette Davis and Burgess Meredith in supporting roles. They were all pretty good in it, but the film itself was hokey and predictable.
24. Barbarian - Cinema. Have been told this is one of the best horror films of the year and by golly it did not dissapoint. Based social commentary, but a light touch with all that stuff. Good seat-of-your pants thrills too. 2022 has indeed been as good a year for horror as one could expect considering the state of the world. Just seen that the director was one of The Whitest Kids You Know, cool. Bit of a departure but it tracks. Fingers crossed for Sex Robot the movie.
25. Night Of The Demons - Shudder. Its like the platonic ideal of a halloween horror film. Very silly but quite a lot of fun. Great 80s Carpenter-but-EBM soundttrack.
26. Terrifier - physical. Shite. Good creepy clown and a very memorable kill before the half way point but that does not a good horror make. Feels quite mean-spirited and mysoginistic for a 2017 film.
27. Pearl - exclusive private showing. Amazing. Loved X, always liked Mia Goth but absolutely feeling the love now. One of the better things I've watched so far.
28. Wendell & Wild - Netflix. Absolute banger spoopy thing to watch with younger relatives or just in general because its awesome. Definitely in the same league as Nightmare Before Christmas and Coraline. Good film, boss soundtrack as well.  Also, this is some of the most based stuff I've seen commited to film since the last Ken Loach. Zombie capitalsim, prison-industrial complex, corruption and collusion - there's a lot in there.
29. Suicide Club - Physical. One of the few formative J-Horrors millenium wave that I haven't actually seen. Probably fair enough that this isn't in the conversation as much as Ring, Pulse or The Grudge, oits not quite as ood as any of those, but it is interesting. It's the same type of horror, the horrors of new media, this time the source of the horror seems to be a meme, though at the time of production no one would have been using that word. Shame because that understanding might have brought focus to a film that's main flaw is losing focus in the third act. Worth a watch.
30. Braindead - physical. One of my favourite films ever, stone col classic, haven't seen it in ages. Holds up like it was cast from gold. The practical effects, especially the forced perspective shots with the Zombaby (getting practice in for Lord Of The Rings) are an absolute delight, as is the script and the visual gags with said baby and the greaser guy's innards which spontaneously achieve independent sentience. Would love Jackson to go back to his roots and do one more like this for the fans like me who've been with him since pre-hollywood, I doubt he will.
31. Well, last day last film, my Shudder sub is about to die so I probably should watch something off it before it goes. But, no... oh god, oh jesus Christ WTF is this blu-Ray that's just appeared in my living room next to the Playstation? Oh fuck me no....
31. Leprechaun, Back 2 Tha Hood - Physical. I don't want to but I am compelled. Its going in. It's playing. Oh Jesus, why are they retconning the Leprechaun's continuity. The fight with the preacher guy didn't happen in the last film? Why call it Back 2 Tha Hood if they aren't picking up from the end of the last one. This is horrible. The weed jokes are shit, like you'd really have to be very stoned to derive any enjoyment out of this. Warwick Davis looks so fucking tired I feel bad for him.
32. Leprechaun: Origins - fuck I dunno, it just started playing after the last one. No, Stahp.
33. Leprechaun Returns - .... Y U do dis....?
34. Leprechaun Vs Candyman... ... ...
35. Leprechaun - The Directors cut... Oh god. I can't stop it. The Leprechaun has taken over. This is my life now. Fucking Leprechaun movies on a loop. Forever and ever.......