The second day of Nightmares Film Festival 2024 kicked off at Ohio’s Gateway Film Center with one of the annual “Recurring Nightmares” block of shorts. These particular blocks are curated strictly from a pool of shorts from fest alumni, and they never fail to blow me away. Absolutely killer work across the board, with A Taco and Treadmill being personal favorites.
While I didn’t have the pleasure of seeing the film Daughter of the Sun, which played at the same time, it’s abundantly clear that it left its mark upon those who did. The crowd pouring out of the screening was an equal mixture of moved and rattled, with even a few folks actually crying. Were they tears of sadness? Joy? Horror? Any or all of the above. I actually didn’t ask, because any film that elicits such reactions is one that I want to see blind whenever it gets distributed.
My second selection of the day was a 50th anniversary of Larry Cohen’s classic killer baby masterpiece, It’s Alive. I’m a big fan of his It’s Alive trilogy – particularly the original – and Cohen’s body of work in general doesn’t really seem to get enough love these days. Being able to catch one of his best on the big screen was just too good to pass up. The short that preceded it, Chew Toy, was excellent and made for a perfect pairing.
Third on deck for Nightmares 2024 was a special screening of the 1911 Italian silent film, L’Inferno. A loose adaptation of Dante’s Inferno, this is actually the oldest surviving feature-length film and also the very first feature-length horror film. Those things alone made it worth attending, so the fact that it was accompanied by a live score from Texas musician Montopolis was just a delicious cherry on top. Those who opted for the warring screening were treated to a sneak peek at indie filmmaker extraordinaire Joe Swanberg’s upcoming film, Kenneled.
Austrian movie-making madman Johannes Grenzfurthner’s Solvent followed. To say that the Masking Threshold and Razzennest filmmaker’s latest offering is thought-provoking would be an understatement. I’ll go into more detail in my review, but for what is perhaps his most commercial film thus far, it still manages to go to a lot of really wild and unexpected places. Fans of his previous two works should definitely mark their calendars once it scores a release date.
The evening then closed out with a screening of Jason Trost’s latest cinematic innovation: The Waves of Madness. What exactly is that? It’s a side-scrolling horror adventure flick that is exactly how what it sounds like: the movie equivalent of an old school bash-‘em-up arcade game. Trost brings the same sense of fun and spontaneity to Waves as he did across his FP series, so if those were up your (goon-filled) alley, you’re going to love this one too.
Saturday brings forth six features, including Dooba Dooba, Melissa LaMartina’s For Sale by Exorcist, and a 10th anniversary screening of Zack Parker’s Proxy. There will also be five more blocks of short films, a live podcast reporting, a panel, and a writing workshop with horror author/screenwriter Jeff Strand! In other words, I have some extremely tough choices ahead of me about what I’m going to sit down for during each block of programming! Such is the burden of Nightmares 2024!
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