fantastic Cinema : 10 direct-to-video to discover them

Cruel situation for genre cinema than the one we live in for the past ten years. Since the advent of VHS in the 1980s, some horror movies, most often of the series B or Z without great artistic ambition, have been denied an exit in the rooms. The process has continued to the era of the DVD and then the Blu-ray, and today continues to provide the VOD platforms of productions to small budget – to view preferably on a Saturday evening once the pizza delivery man is past. But since the beginning of the year 2010, the direct-to-video breed. And if you look more closely, you can find between two films of holdings and opportunistic bottom-of-front, of true nuggets that are worth some films released in cinemas.

GINGER SNAPS

Released in 2000, directed by John Fawcettwith Emily Perkins, Katharine Isabelle and Kris Lemche.

Two sisters, teen girls and inseparable will have to cope with all the transformation of one of them in werewolf…every time she has her period.

If I tell you : a legendary figure in fantasy transposed into a world of teens, emotional, you answer me ? Twilight ? Uh…no, try again. Small canadian film that caused a sensation in its time, Ginger Snaps is not just to resume the myth of the loup-garou, for the umpteenth program horror. He has dusted off by making it a metaphor for a period violent of life, where there is a fear of both what we are and what we will become. It takes a judicious use of the fantastic : bring up the disorder, and the fear to exacerbate the emotion aroused by the relationship moving between the two sisters.

HYSTERIA

Released in 2015, directed by Brad Anderson, with Jim Sturgess, Kate Beckinsale and Ben Kingsley

Edward Newgate, a young psychiatrist, starts her career at the asylum, Stonehearst. On the first evening, he will be interested in Eliza Graves, a patient with hysteria. However, he discovered later that the director of the establishment is not what he claims to be.

Passed almost unnoticed upon its release last summer, Hysteria had yet enough strengths to hope for a theatrical release : a cast lip-smacking, direction, artistic neat and a director already felt by the audience thanks to his previous work as The Machinist. Brad Anderson sign here an adaptation of the master Edgar Allan Poe that combines state-of-mind romantic and gothic atmosphere with just the right amount of care in the writing of the characters, to avoid leaving the grand-guignol take on the psychology. Note that if the scenario moves the story to the end of the Nineteenth century, is to bring more questions on the progress of psychiatry in this period promethean.

MOON

Released in 2009, directed by Duncan Jones, with Sam Rockwell, Dominique McElligott and Kaya Scodelario

A few weeks before the end of his contract, Sam, the sole employee of a lunar base begins to see and hear strange things.

As soon as the first film hailed at festivals around the world, Duncan Jones proves his talent for storytelling in the fantasy and science-fiction. Moon is noted for its atmosphere that is both oppressive and calm, sometimes even strangely comfortable, thanks to the silence and the sketch of his lunar base. Only on the screen for a major part of the film, Sam Rockwell is alone all the loneliness and uncertainty of the human being, without that the film does not toggle in the wild imaginings of metaphysical post-Kubrick ; choosing an approach any other science-fiction fully trust the twists and turns of the story.

BYZANTIUM

Released in 2013, directed by Neil Jordan, with Gemma Aterton, Saoirse Ronan and Jonny Lee Miller

In a small coastal town, two young female vampires landed out of nowhere. Clara makes the acquaintance of Noel, a lonely, collecting them in her family pension deserted Byzantium

Those who have not yet cast a glance at the filmography of Neil Jordan, I advise them to discover, without further delay, this incurable romantic. He signed with Byzantium, a continuation ofInterview with a Vampire, a work already imbued with a feminine sensibility, while its main characters are two men. Extending its secularist vision of the vampire, devoid of codes of exploitation cinema (cloves of garlic, stakes, and coffins), he chose two wonderful actresses to embody the eternal paradox between youth of the body and old age of the soul.

THE DIVIDE

Released in 2012, directed by Xavier Genswith Lauren German, Michael There and Milo Ventimiglia

Survivors of a nuclear attack, eight people take refuge in a bunker and managed to survive thanks to a stock of provisions. But soon, tensions are formed within the group.

While the wave of zombie déferlait in cinemas as on VOD platforms, Xavier Gens proposed to treat the book of revelation by a narrative camera, which rightly reminds us of the confinement as do the survivors of the movies infected. By focusing on only eight characters, People managed to compose a whole range of madness, leaving us to think that every human mind is as complex and civilized he may be, has the fragility that will take over once his compass was will be collapsed. Note the performance of the actors, who have each agreed to lose ten pounds during the filming.

JOHN DIES AT THE END

Released in 2012, directed by Don Coscarelliwith Chase Williamson, Rob Mayes and Paul Giamatti

John and Dave, are experimenting with a drug that allows them to glimpse into a parallel reality, where they are regarded as saviors.

In forty years of career, the inventive Don Coscarelli has unfortunately experienced more low than high. Probably frustrated by the many missed appointments with the audience, the filmmaker has let go on her timeline to let him venture into areas of the wild of his prolific imagination. The menu looks like a mezze film where one can enjoy scene after scene as many of the eccentric delights that synthesize in the end, a half-century of counter-culture, ranging from literature, “psychotrophe ‘ at the movie bis. If you like to be constantly surprised, don’t miss this ufo whose story is reinvented at regular intervals, as if it were a game of exquisite corpse.

CITADEL

Released in 2012, directed by Ciarán Foywith Aneurin Barnard, James Cosmo and Amy Shiels

A young father of family, agoraphobic following the assault of his wife, joins forces with a priest to save his daughter from the clutches of a band of savages.

Small parenthesis lexicologique : to speak of the social dimension of some horror films where the threat is often represented by young offenders hidden by the hood of their hoodies, the anglo-saxons speak of the “hoodie horror”. With Heartless by Philip Ridley, Citadel is the best example of the genre. Violent, unhealthy, visceral. This little irish movie evokes a contemporary form of terror, typical of the urban way of life, which is all the more the viewer to the guts, by adopting the point of view of a father was beyond her weaknesses to save the being that he is the most expensive in the world.

BLACK DEATH

Released in 2010, directed by Christopher Smithwith Eddie Redmayne, Sean Bean and Carice Van Houten

While the first outbreak of bubonic plague ravages England a young monk named Osmund receives the mission to accompany a group of knights to investigate a small remote village where the dead are returned to life.

Filmmaker lighthouse at the revival of the fantastic cinema british in the years 2000, Christopher Smith may have influenced the american television, without the public even realizes it. In fact, in the Black Death we already find the ingredients that are very to fashion in the present series, namely the confrontation between violence and faith, between the cruelty of a medieval world and the beliefs intended to elevate the souls of the mortals – expensive ingredients to series The Bastard executioner and The Last kingdom. Add to that a first meeting on the screen of the manly Sean Bean and mesmerizing Carice Van Houten, prior to their appearance in Game of Thrones, and the correlation is all the more troubling.

TIMECRIMES

Released in 2008, directed by Nacho Vigalondowith Karra Elejalde, Candela Fernandez and Barbara Goenaga

A man accidentally makes a trip back in time and is confronted with himself an hour earlier. By seeking at any price to fix this error and to return to the present, it will trigger without intending to a series of disasters that are irreparable.

Sacred to the price of the best unique video of the festival of Gérardmer, Timecrimes is one of the few stories of science fiction-Spanish to we be able, at a time when the country ofAmenabar was shining especially for its horror films. Considering the possibilities of the genre by starting a treatment minimalist, where there is less of a question of impressing the viewer with the image, that of the be captivated by the twists and turns of the scenario, the director was able to bring to the screen the vertigo of existential besetting the human being when he thinks of the fragility of its existence, governed by a constant interplay of causes and consequences.

THE WOMAN

Released in 2011, directed by Lucky McKeewith Pollyanna McIntosh, Sean Bridgers and Angela Bettis

The father of a family seriously disrupted mission is to civilize a wild woman. But this will cost him dear.

Lucky McKee is a great shooter of genre cinema, and it was therefore logical that he rubs a day to the literary work of the corrosive Jack Ketchum, to depict without concession the underlying violence of american society. In the Face of the dehumanization of the character of the stunning Pollyanna McIntosh, the director texan up in the mirror the ideological blindness of the family puritan. Therefore difficult for a distributor to assume the utraviolence of the film, the output of which is thus made in the utmost discretion, as if it were all coming from the torture porn.