Fantastic cinema: “Families, I haunt you!”

magictr | January 4, 2024 | Art | No Comments

Children with supernatural powers, a grandmother who haunts her granddaughter, a possessed mother: because they speak to everyone, childhood and family stories remain a formidable source for fantastic cinema, celebrated at the Festival de Gérardmer.

A sensation among the ten films in the competition which ends on Sunday, “The Innocents” proves it with a distressing dive into the magical, but cruel, world of childhood.

The film, which is released on February 9 in France, features four little Norwegians who discover their powers of telepathy and telekinesis. Away from the gaze of adults, their games threaten to turn into massacre.

“I wanted to enter this closed world of childhood to really try to see the world as children do, and for viewers to find their own memories,” Norwegian director Eskil Vogt, one of the rising stars, explains to AFP. of Nordic auteur cinema. He is also the compatriot and screenwriter of Joachim Trier.

Beyond the terror, the film celebrates these “free spaces where children are all alone, where they can experiment, transgress, and who exist less and less”, he adds.

At the other end of the age pyramid, it is with a grandmother that the Spanish king of horror Paco Plaza, author of the successful films “(Rec)” thrills in “La Abuela”, expected in French cinemas in the spring.

No journalist immersed in a haunted building, as in the series that made him known, but an almost intimate story, that of an elderly and bedridden lady (the former Brazilian model Vera Valdez) and her granddaughter (Almudena Amor), haunted by the fear of growing old.

– Possession –

This young model must leave in disaster the Parisian fashion shows where she was beginning to break through to go to her grandmother's bedside, in a dark Madrid apartment with creaky parquet floors and slamming doors.

Faced with this grandmother rendered mute by illness, and the supernatural events which seem to surround her, the young woman will quickly lose her footing, in an atmosphere partly inspired by Roman Polanski's “Rosemary's Baby”.< /p>

“I wanted to express this fear of not recognizing” a member of his family who is aging, Paco Plaza told AFP. An anxiety born after seeing her own aunt struck by Alzheimer's disease: “We see the person, but in her eyes we see that she is no longer there. It's like a possession, of which the demon would be the old age”, he continues.

“The horror genre is the most effective way to express (…) things that are in our heads”, adds Paco Plaza. “Show that we all have many people inside of us, our parents, our grandparents. We only add layers to the family.”

Questions of heritage which also feed on “Samhain”, which is due to be released in France on August 10, and features a young Irish girl, Char, bullied at high school, who lives in the company of her mother Angela, consumed by poverty. depression.

In a suburb of Dublin in the midst of preparations for Halloween (“Samhain” is the Celtic name), Angela's behavior becomes more and more mysterious and violent…

Evil powers imbued with Celtic folklore, in which director Kate Dolan grew up, or the fruit of the tortured imagination of a teenager confronted with her mother's depression ? The film does not decide.

“In my family, there are stories of mental illness. And it remains a part of you forever, even when you want to escape from it”, confides the director, of whom it is the first feature film, at AFP. “The film also tries to say that we have to accept it, confront it and then we can survive.”

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