Demons and Murder and Scandal, Oh My: A girl’s guide to Hellions, a new film by Bruce McDonald

This Halloween, Whizbang Films and Storyteller Pictures bring audiences face-to-mask with director Bruce McDonald’s newest terror flick, HELLIONS. The film tells the story of Dora, a teen who must survive a hellish Halloween fighting pint-sized demons who stake claim on more than just delicious bags of candy. HELLIONS will haunt you for weeks, hammering home the old adage, “be careful what you wish for, it just might come true”.

The film stars Chloe Rose (DEGRASSI: THE NEXT GENERATION), Robert Patrick (TERMINATOR 2: JUDGEMENT DAY, TRUE BLOOD), Rossif Sutherland (REIGN, HIGH LIFE), Luke Bilyk (DEGRASSI: THE NEXT GENERATION) and Rachel Wilson (REPUBLIC OF DOYLE, BOMB GIRLS).

The Kill Spot sat down with Chloe and Rachel to learn a little more about the movie through the eyes of the ladies who battle these malevolent masked creatures.

TKS: Great to meet you both. I know you’re in between takes, so I’ll get right to it! I describe HELLIONS as a mash up of THE WIZARD OF OZ meets TRICK ‘R TREAT meets ALIEN. These movies all feature strong, young, female protagonists. Who are some of your favourite heroines in film and did you draw on them for your characters?

Chloe: That’s a great question. I don’t think I’ve pulled on anyone specifically. I’d like to think Dora is a person of her own. I think that’s what makes her really interesting. She has no insecurities, she knows exactly who she is and she has no problem being exactly that. They’ve written an interesting teenager. Most teenagers are portrayed as subdued and quiet, or angsty, because they don’t know who they are yet, where Dora is angsty because she knows too much and is too intelligent for her own good. It’s kickass that the heroine has to kick butt and pull herself together.

TKS: What do you think the significance is of making the protagonist/heroine a teenage girl?

Chloe: The hellions are kind of reflections of Dora’s childhood. When Dora gets some life changing news, she really must face growing up even though she’s not ready to be an adult.  She experiences things as, you know, a girl, that guys just never will – physically, mentally, socially etc. It’s a poetic and intense coming of age story, like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, with more blood and guts!

TKS: Rachel, my next question is for you. HELLIONS takes on the mother-daughter relationship. What resonates with you about motherhood and family as the subject of this film?

Rachel: When it comes to losing someone you love, a parent losing a child is the most devastating. There’s definitely the sense that if you add motherhood and family to any horror movie you’re raising the stakes. The things that happen to Dora are basically the worst things that you can imagine happening to your child, all coming true. That will really hit home for a lot of people.

TKS: This is a script written by a man and directed by a man but it features leading women. I am wondering how the collaboration with Bruce affected or shaped the female voice of the story.

Chloe: I mean, working with Bruce has been really interesting. He’s totally open to anyone else’s interpretation and ideas. I’ve said this a lot in interviews because it’s the only way I can describe it. He has this vision and then he takes everyone else’s ideas and he morphs them together. So I don’t think it tainted the idea of the woman protagonist.

Rachel: He’s very collaborative. He just did an amazing job. He strikes me as a person who has a lot of sensitivity so you’re not going into a film with a director who is super macho. I mean he’s a compassionate, warm, sensitive human being so he’s going to create a film that has all those elements.

Chloe: On top of being super cool at all times. Altogether, I don’t think they could have picked a better director for something like this.

TKS: Thanks so much guys, for sitting down with The Kill Spot.

Chloe and Rachel: Thanks Alison.

HELLIONS is written by Pascal Trottier (THE COLONY), directed by Bruce McDonald (PONTYPOOL, HARD CORE LOGO) and produced by Frank Siracusa (HOBO WITH A SHOTGUN) and Paul Lenart (HONOR CODE).

 You can stay up to date with the latest HELLIONS news on Twitter and Facebook.

And, be sure to check out the HELLIONS Video Contest! The contest is open to anyone with a scary video, up to two minutes long. The theme: Red. Submissions can take any form – a fake trailer, a scene from a horror script you’ve been writing, a short film – as long as they somehow connect to Red. Red like blood, red like hellfire, red like blind passion, red like Blood Moons on Halloween … use your wildest imagination. You have until February 28, 2014 to enter. For more details about the contest and/or to find out more about the film, visit hellionsmovie.com.

M is for Madame-Kali (2013) – Director: Jazz Virk

Title: M is for Madame-Kali
Year: 2013
Country: Canada/UK
Director: Jazz Virk
Writer: Jazz Virk
Producers: Dov Weiss, Jazz Virk, Swarit Jajal, Vandana Sidhu, James Antonio
Director of Photography: Nigel Akam

Plot Summary: A woman’s revenge is Kali Ma, the Hindu goddess of death and destruction.

Virk’s latest piece raises awareness about violence against women. The story is inspired by and is dedicated to Jyoti Singh Pandey, India’s ‘New Delhi gang rape victim’ who was brutally raped and murdered in 2012.

This short was submitted as part of the ABCs of Death 2 26th Director Search. Learn more here. A longer version of the film will be coming out in Winter/Spring 2014.

“Anger is part of my relation to the world”: An Interview with Claire Denis, By Kiva Reardon

As seen in Cleo.

Claire Denis has never shied away from monsters. While her work is described as sensual and erotic (both true), her films are never sentimental. They are complex, engaging with the fact that life, while often beautiful, is also harsh, cruel, and painful. This pain has been explored in relation to colonial history (Chocolat, 1988), the immigrant experience (No Fear, No Die, 1990), maturing adolescence (U.S. Go Home, 1994; Nenette and Boni, 1996), serial killers (I Can’t Sleep, 1994) and semi-cannibals (flesh is bitten, but never consumed inTrouble Every Day, 2001), sublimated homosexual desire (Beau Travail, 1999), mortality (Intruder, 2004), and back to that colonial experience again (White Material, 2009). She is interested in the grey areas, and eschews didactic, pointed narration in favour of suggestive imagery and sensation. Voiceover, while used, often complicates rather than explicates matters, offering glimpses into the rich interiority of her characters. As she says in the documentary Claire Denis, The Vagabond (1996): “I’m interested in the slice of humanity that surrounds a monster.”

Finding that slice of humanity is all but impossible in her latest film, Bastards (2013)A scathing indictment of contemporary France, late-stage capitalism, and feel-good film trends, Bastards is a severe and brutal film. The story follows Marco (Vincent Lindon), a seaman who returns to Paris when his brother-in-law commits suicide. There, he finds his family in ruins, both financially (their shoe company has gone bankrupt) and emotionally (his niece Justine, played by Lola Créton, has been sexually abused and is addicted to drugs). Upon discovering that a seedy financier, Eduard (Michel Subor), is to blame, Marco seeks revenge by seducing the man’s wife, the much younger Raphaëlle (Chiara Mastroianni).

Bastards is comprehensive in its bleakness. The graphic content (including not-so-subtle allusions to horrific sexual abuse) is matched by the overall grey tones. An alienating electronic soundtrack dominates, composed by longtime Denis collaborators Tindersticks, who eschew the warmth of past scores with droning synth. It is also one of her least thematically oblique films, all but over-determined in its near-Greek-tragedy qualities that suggest Marco, and all the players, are doomed from the outset. In a lesser director’s hands, such a well-trod tale of revenge and familial rot might succumb to cliché, but Denis’ familiar (and beautiful) elliptical touch remains. This touch, however, is not the same lush caress of prior works; the lingering shots of Lindon’s muscular back straining beneath a crisp white shirt or of the nape of Raphaëlle’s neck (an often relished body part in the Denis oeuvre) bespeak vulnerability rather than eroticism. Violation is the name of the game here, a fact established from the start with an image of Justine walking bloodied and nude down a dark street. This image loosely structures the film, coming up time and again as the narrative builds to its brutal conclusion: a video of Justine being raped. This sordid image is the film’s final, devastating blow. But it is the money shot we deserve. Because although Bastards seethes with anger, it is not the nihilistic kind. It is the kind of righteous, if not revolutionary, anger that forces us to face the monsters, removing us from comfortable cocoons of passivity, and leads us to engage with the world—in all its horror, despair, and beauty. Only those who do not are truly doomed.

cléo: So our next issue is on the theme of “doom”—

Claire Denis: Doomed?

cléo: Doom. This theme was decided upon well before I saw Bastards, but then I saw it and—

Denis: It is a very doomed film!

cléo: Yes. It works perfectly, but doom isn’t a new theme for you. You can see it in films like Trouble EverydayBeau TravailWhite Material. Here, however, it feels different in the sense that it’s angry—and I don’t mean that in a trite or reductive way.

Denis: No, it is angry. This is true. I was not aware of it when I was writing it, but I was full of anger. But it’s a sort of deep anger that I didn’t feel when I was shooting. Something came so naturally out of me, but with love for the characters. I must admit I was not angry at my characters. I was angry at something else, maybe the society I’m living in or what films keep selling. We’re in a world that is hard and violent, but there is redemption at the end and blah, blah, blah. But this is not true. It’s not true. But this is not new for me. When I was a teenager— and this shaped much of my life—I read William Faulkner. I found a vision of life that is made from blood and—the word in English… C’est comme “l’amour,” faire l’amour…un mot très biblique…fornication! Le sang et la fornication. [It is like “love”; to make love, but a more biblical term…fornication! Blood and fornication.] I was very young, but I realized it was true, that we are born from this. This can change in the process of life, but it remains.

cléo: That intersection of the erotic and blood or death has come up before in your work. Especially in Trouble Every Day. But there’s a beautiful sort of poetry of the violence in that film; here the eroticism is gone. It’s bleak.

Denis: Yeah, it’s true. Because Trouble Every Day was fun. It was fun to go that far together, although the scenes were painful. I remember, those two scenes [of Béatrice Dalle consuming a man mid-coitus and Vincent Gallo taking an act of cunnilingus too far], we were afraid shooting them, editing them, acting them. Bastards was bleak. We were doing something, knowing it was wrong. Because when Marco, the lead character, decides to make love to the neighbour [Raphaëlle], it’s not true love or desire—it’s through vengeance. Maybe a sort of love came with this, but at the beginning it’s almost hate, that action.

cléo: I wanted to talk about the film image in Bastards; the video of Justine being raped. Why include it?

Denis: I think it would have been weird to finish the film on Marco dead and not go back to the mother [Sandra, played by Julie Bataille]. Now she knows she has been blind, her daughter [Créton] is dead, she wants to see those images. I think it was fair. For me, it was fair that she would ask the doctor [played by Alex Descas] to be with her, because she was afraid, and the images belong in the film. And they were not terribly explicit. They were explicit, but it was in a blur. It was not showing too much.

cléo: Women bear the brunt of this film too. I wouldn’t say it’s punishment or victimization, but they bear the brunt of what happens.

Denis: Yes.

cléo: Can you talk about that choice? Why focus on mothers and daughters?

Denis: I think I focus on fathers. To be a father, like Marco is a father. And what happens when this kind of thing occurs between a daughter and a father. Because the daughter is not completely a victim of her father, she’s accepting it too. In a way—maybe I’m about to be completely crazy—when I was the age of a daughter I thought if I had a bad experience with sex, even though the man was brutal or ignorant or whatever, I always took it for granted that this was my problem. That this was the problem of women, to keep it for ourselves.On déplace le problème. [We shift the blame.] I remember when I was very young and coming home and thinking: “Well, this is my problem. There is nowhere I can go and complain.” There’s not a guiltiness of being a woman, but women deal with their bodies in a very complex way, a total way, a global way. Not like men. Men, they have a hard-on or not. The feeling of a woman is so much more complex, because she can pretend, she can fake, she can also be terrified and hate and not show it. I think to be a woman is a complete sexual experience in a way. And this makes everything more complex.

cléo: I love this idea of a complex sexuality. I find this sentiment comes across in your “Paris films,” if we can call them that, as it subverts the idea of Paris as “the city of love.” The way you use Paris in this film seems to do that—can you talk about how you used the city in Bastards?

Denis: It’s all the places I dislike! [Laughs] The building, the apartment—I’m afraid of that part of Paris. I have no commitment to that city. When I did I Can’t Sleep, I was showing a Paris with a serial killer, but it was the Paris I never grew up in but discovered as an adult. This film was bleak also. It doesn’t only mean “bourgeois.” Bourgeois sometimes means money, finding a nice penthouse. No, I wanted something like a tomb, for the apartment to look like a tomb.

cléo: We touched on this briefly, the idea of the film coming from this social anger. To me, this felt like a righteous anger towards late-stage capitalism. And this was said about White Material, that it was a “social problem film,” which was a considered shift for you. Do you see this film that way?

Denis: No, I did it genuinely. It was just in me. I would never say: “Claire, now it is time to make a social film, let’s get involved in social things!” No, I am living in a country, I am living my life. I’m filled with anger, I’m filled with regret, I’m filled with great memories, also poetic memories. But anger is part of my relation to the world.

cléo: I want to talk about the cinematic body and the way you use it. Bodies are used in a way in which the skin of the film becomes your own. Why does filming this way speak to you? …

Read full interview in Cleo Journal here.

Carrie Remake Shows Women in Horror Are More Than Pretty Victims, By Angela Watercutter

As seen in Wired.

There’s a reason Carrie has endured for decades. Whether it’s Stephen King’s original 1974 novel, Brian De Palma’s screen adaptation, or any other version – including the one currently in theaters from director Kimberly Peirce – the saga of Carrie White perseveres because most of us have either been Carrie White or have known a Carrie White, and we can relate to the story of an underdog exacting revenge on bullies.

It gets a little more interesting, however, because it’s a tale of horror and the underdog protagonist is a woman. For decades, horror films were traditionally, seemingly one-stop schlock offerings for every kind of violence against women. Sure, some of them got out alive – the trope of the “Final Girl” doesn’t exist by accident – but it’s generally understood that some of the gravest and most gruesome things ever to happen to women onscreen happened in horror flicks.

There were exceptions like Alien, which subverted the horror trope of sexualized violence against woman into a story of male sexual horrorCarrie, too, was something very, very different from the traditional horror films where sexy girls got stabbed with knives; instead, we met the meek daughter of a religious fanatic who exacted revenge on high school bullies who mocked her when she got her period. In this sense, Carrie (the character and the story) is something of a feminist icon – and it’s intentional. “Carrie is largely about how women find their own channels of power, but also what men fear about women and women’s sexuality,” King wrote in Danse Macabre. “The book is, in its more adult implications, an uneasy masculine shrinking from a future of female equality.” In other words, the scares in Carrie are derived from a fear of strong women.

The modern version of Carrie, despite probably not being as seminal as De Palma’s 1976 version, manages to get one thing very right (in addition to its treatment of bullying): Carrie’s self-awareness. Chloë Grace Moretz in 2013 may not have the hapless outsider quality of her predecessor Sissy Spacek, but she makes up for it by playing her Carrie as someone who has agency. While she starts out not even knowing what menstruation is, she ends up realizing that women can have power. (Peirce even calls it a “superhero origin story.”) Maybe it’s the Hit-Girl in her bones, but there’s a knowing look in Moretz’s eye when she realizes just how powerful she is. Spacek had a bit of that, but in the late ’70s version she acted more as though the power simply worked through her, whereas Moretz harnesses it for herself. It’s subtle change, but an important one – and a nice reminder of how the role of women in horror movies has changed since 1976.

So if Carrie is the hero, what is the horror? In her book Men, Women, and Chain Saws, film professor Carol J. Clover suggests that she is both: a hybrid “victim-hero,” whose dual role is enabled by the cultural reaction to feminism – as something that creates fear in the men and women who don’t understand it and bestows power on the women who do. As Clover notes, it also provides a language to define Carrie’s victimization – at the hands of bullies both male and female – and gives justification to her ultimate Samson-bringing-down-the-temple retribution.

Yet the men in the audience also identify with her as she wreaks her revenge. Why? King has a theory: “One reason for the success of the story in both print and film, I think, lies in this: Carrie’s revenge is something that any student who has ever had his gym shorts pulled down in Phys Ed or his glasses thumb-rubbed in study hall could approve of.” In other words, Clover writes, a young man who’s been humiliated in a locker room can identify with a young woman pelted with tampons in a gym shower; King also suggests the “possibility that male viewers are quite prepared to identify not just with screen females, but with screen females in the horror-film world, screen females in fear and pain.” The new version of Carrie states this almost flat-out, using Carrie’s eventual prom date, Tommy Ross, who relates her locker-room torture to his own experiences being bullied in grade school.

There’s a second reason for this, as well: Movie-making can be a powerful tool to help us see the world through the eyes of other people, and to allow us to make those sorts of connections between our experiences and experiences of people who are different. In the simplest terms, movie watching is about identifying with a protagonist (or occasionally antagonist) that we root for – a perspective that’s largely delivered by the point-of-view of the camera and director. And what’s especially powerful is that it invites everyone in the audience – female and male – to see things through Carrie’s eyes, to identify with her humiliation and powerlessness (rather than treating it as entertainment) and to exult along with her when she finally fights back and claims her power.

Film theorist Laura Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” suggested that most Hollywood films look at women through a very sadistic or fetishistic lens, something that she termed the “male gaze.” On the surface, there are plenty of examples of this in the horror genre, which, as Scream’s Sidney Prescott accurately observed, regularly features “some big-breasted girl who can’t act who is always running up the stairs when she should be running out the front door,” not to mention all manner of sexual violence against women, including “tree rape.”

But the genre has also given us the likes of the original “Final Girl” in Jamie Lee Curtis’ Laurie Strode in Halloween and Alien‘s tough Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver). The genre turned out Charlotte McGee, the titular (and similarly King-created) character from Firestarter, whose stare causes blazes. And the changes in the new Carrie  – a more self-aware protagonist, a more sensitive student population – allow Peirce to demonstrate how women of horror, and really women of film, have evolved in the intervening years.

Clover originally published Men, Women, and Chain Saws in 1992. Since then the tide of women’s representation in horror films has only shifted further. Teeth turned vagina dentata (Google it) into a plot device. The Soska sisters from Canada are turning gendered horror tropes on their heads with films like Dead Hooker in a Trunk and American Mary. The “rebirth” of Evil Dead (it of the infamous “tree rape”) that came out earlier this year [SPOILER ALERT] turned its hero into a heroine – a welcome change after the dismissive “she’s your girlfriend, you take care of her” language in the original.

Even Diablo Cody’s campy Jennifer’s Body, while still playing into the trope of the demonized (literally) sexual woman, attempted to flip the typical gender tropes of the slasher film. There’s now even talk of a TV show – starring Jamie Lee Curtis herself! – called The Final Girls, which opts to bring together women who have survived their own horror fates and are brought together for righting of wrongs. It’s way too early to tell if these women will have to fall into the “final girl” stereotype of masculinized women that are perceived as asexual or virginal (read: not deserving of death), but hopefully the new awareness will seep in. If it does – then the signs that Carrie’s real revenge will be coming to fruition.

A lot of the conversation leading up to the release of the latest Carrie can be boiled down to: Do we need another one? …

Continuing reading article and watch trailer here.