A scarecrow flies through the air, witches hold a sabbath, and mouths form in the mist in this shadowy early animation that inspired the famous Fantasia sequence; Alexeieff would reprise the same pinscreen animation technique for a segment in The Trial.
Tag Archives: Experimental
CAPSULE: MARE’S NEST (2026)
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DIRECTED BY: Ben Rivers
FEATURING: Moon Guo Barker
PLOT: The adventures of a young girl wandering a post-apocalyptic world devoid of adults.
COMMENTS: A girl of about 10 crashes a car into a tree to avoid a turtle in the road, then dictates a long lesson on evolution to the reptile. She encounters other children in a cave before making her way to a cabin, the goal of her quest, where she asks questions of a mysterious Sage (also about 10) who speaks through an Interpreter (also about 10). What follow is an absurdist interrogation where our protagonist, the delightful Moon, tries to figure out “what is happening,” while the serene Sage and intense Interpreter flatly provide answers along the lines of “the God of love and money is dead; only the planet speaks” and “fish are drowning in Great Slave Lake.” The Sage herself occasionally interjects or speaks in tongues (a running joke is that the Sage will say something like “skim milk,” and the Interpreter will helpfully add “She is saying skim milk”). The children deliver all this complex intellectual back-and-forth dialogue with a blank delivery that suggests they only half-understand what is going on—sort of like the audience at this point.
The above sequence is the most memorable part of Mare’s Nest, and it’s actually an in-film performance of Don Delillo’s one-act play “The Word for Snow.” The rest of Mare’s Nest’s episodes may, or may not, have been inspired by DeLillo. My bet is not, because Rivers, who is a painter as well as a filmmaker, seems to have little interest in language, unlike DeLillo. After “The Word for Snow” segment closes, the remaining hour of film is entirely dialogue-free (although a kid does, at one point, screech out some song lyrics while accompanying himself on a vintage Yamaha keyboard). Moon encounters other children living in a state of utopian anarchy, making their own musical instruments, enacting a play about the Minotaur (which is actually Ben Rivers’ standalone 2022 short “The Minotaur”) in the Lithica labyrinth in Menorca, and visiting a kind of museum of adults who are frozen in freakish tableaux vivants, reminiscent of the mummies of Pompeii. The cinematography, some of which is presented as if unspooling on distressed pseudo-vintage film stock, is appealing throughout, reinforcing the notion that Rivers’ primarily interest is visual communication.
It may all be some kind of meditation on the coming obsolescence of language (“what is the point of this language or that language,” says the Interpreter). Or perhaps a premonition of an upcoming social apocalypse which will force humanity to reset its way of life and begin anew. The opening and closing of Mare’s Nest imply a circular narrative structure, although I have no idea how that’s supposed to fit into the movie’s larger themes—and admittedly, I can’t confidently identify what those larger themes might be.
The film is divided into about 7 independent chapters (Moon scrawls the title of each on a chalkboard), with the only genuine link being the presence of Moon and her peers in a world without adults. The project may have worked better as a series of independent shorts than it does as a feature film. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the obsolete idiom “a mare’s nest” refers to an “illusory discovery, something of apparent importance causing excitement but which turns out to be a delusion or a hoax.” This is not the title I would choose for my own movie, but perhaps Rivers was feeling particularly puckish when he picked it.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
I think this movie is weirder than average
I think this movie is better than average
IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: CUADECUC VAMPIR (1971)
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DIRECTED BY: Pere Portabella
FEATURING: Christopher Lee, Herbert Lom, Soledad Miranda
PLOT: B-roll footage from Jesus Franco’s Count Dracula (1970) repurposed into an avant-garde presentation of the story.
COMMENTS: Pere Portabella’s oeuvre refuses to be easily intelligible. It embraces the fragmentary nature of surrealism, suggesting the idea of a narrative without delivering a cohesive story. Portabella is especially known for his clandestine period: a series of films made illegally during the Franco regime in the late 1960s and early 1970s, employing guerrilla tactics in the vein of the Third Cinema.
Cuadecuc Vampir is perhaps his most famous work from that period, an abstracted take on the vampiric myth camouflaged as a making-of documentary for the European co-production Count Dracula by Jesús Franco, directed a year before. Franco’s movie was a typically mediocre B-movie affair following the tradition of Hammer Films, even using Christopher Lee as Dracula.
Portabella worked like a documentary filmmaker for this project. During Franco’s movie, his own crew filmed the improvisations and behind-the-scenes footage without directing anything himself. Due to purposeful continuity errors and grainy black-and-white high-contrast photography, he made something whose effect closely resembles the unearthing and manipulation of long-lost media: that is, a found-footage movie.
As in a found-footage movie, Portabella uses editing to set the mood he has in mind. An oppressive and claustrophobic atmosphere emerges through segments depicting the spread of vampirism from an old patriarch. The results hints at possible political undertones, but those are not always clear.
What remains undeniable, though, is the anachronistic aesthetic—a result of the stylistic choices mentioned above—that engages in a dialogue with the cinematic tradition of gothic horror and the vampire myth, and explicitly refers to productions the silent era. Nearly all diegetic sounds are muted, replaced by an experimental soundscape composed by concert pianist Carles Santos, including thunderstorms, tapping sounds, and glitchy effects alongside the melodies, deconstructing any sense of cinematic illusion. From the beginning, the creative process unmasks itself: practical effects are shown during their construction, actors take off their makeup, cinematic crews appear onscreen or in mirrors.
Cuadecuc could be interesting as a glimpse into the backstage production for fans of Franco’s original movie, but only if they are open to an experimental format without voiceover and with no informative intent. But the film stands alone as a puzzling and challenging cinematic experience.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
I think this movie is weirder than average
I think this movie is better than average
SATURDAY SHORT: SOMEONE TO STEAL HORSES WITH (2024)
Using guided meditation, a retired racehorse promotes his latest book on a radio show.
366 UNDERGROUND: THE VAMPIRES OF NEW ORLEANS (2026)
DIRECTED BY: Andrew Rakich
FEATURING: Courtnee Carter, Linnea Gregg, Andrew Rakich, Benton Guinness, Monica R. Harris, Mekhai Lee, Josh Popa, Carl Sailor, Matthew Van Gessell, Kendra Unique
PLOT: When Brigitte Jackson’s sister is found dead under mysterious circumstances on the streets of New Orleans, she begins an investigation which leads her to a trinity of vampires; interspersed with this story is documentary footage exploring the city’s vampire heritage.
COMMENTS: “Y’all believe in vampires?”
It begins with the clap of a slate and an interview with “Sanguinarian Vampire” couple “Louis De Pointe Du Lac” and “Lestat De Lioncourt,” who found each other and moved to New Orleans’ French Quarter, in their words, “to live authentically regardless of society.” Then comes a series of interviews with various experts on “lifestyle vampires,” people self-identifying as vampires. This phenomenon appears to have started in the 1970s –80s in the NYC occult scene and grown in the1990s, with the Internet allowing more people to connect and converge on New Orleans to “live the Life.”
America has a love affair with vampires. They’re almost inescapable, everywhere you look.
Atun-Shei Film’s The Vampires Of New Orleans, a follow-up to their independent debut feature The Sudbury Devil, brings that same energy and cheek to a survey of tortured Americana that promises to be “the final word on the New Orleans Vampire as a pop culture figure.” It’s a big swing for an experimental docudrama. An epic one, in fact, clocking in at 159 minutes (including an Overture and Entr’acte, like a Hollywood roadshow picture). It will be interesting to see how audiences receive it.
The main narrative which hits the expected tropes of a vampire tale. Shania Jackson (Unique) is abducted by Nate Debney (Guiness), the human familiar for Jean-Louis D’Hemecourt (Rakich). D’Hemecourt has two sires: Josephine Macarti (Gregg) a Southern Belle turned vampire after her husband’s death in the Civil War, and the Axeman of New Orleans (Sailor), a (real) serial killer who preyed on Italian immigrants in 1918–19. This trio has been hunting and feeding in New Orleans for some time, with D’Hemecourt stressing that he “does not kill humans”—“humans” defined as “Whites.” Shania’s sister, Brigitte (Carter) crosses the path of the vamps while looking into the death, and with the assistance of her aunt Saffron (Harris) and street hustler/Voudon priest Dr. Tom (Lee) attempts to avenge her sister. It doesn’t play out as easily as they may hope.
It’s a straightforward narrative, but it’s all interspersed with those “expert” interviews—historians, tour guides, vampires (Sanguinarian and psychic)—who provide context and commentary on vampire folklore, specifically that which involves New Orleans: the LaLaurie Mansion, the Casquette (casket) Girls, Jacques St. Germain, and the Axeman. They also provide a critique. While there proves to be rich and horrific historical lore in New Orleans, most, if not all, pertaining to vampires stems from a single source: Anne Rice’s “Interview With The Vampire,” published in the early to mid 70s, which fed the fantasies of self-identifying vamps and their acolytes and created a cottage industry of ghost tourism goosing up dry historical facts with the hook of the lurid supernatural. As one interviewee states, they’re “very grateful to Anne Rice for the tourism she brought.” “Interview” also helped sanitize the image of the vampire from the bloated, pestilent corpse depicted in European lore into a dark romantic figure, the aristocrat of Southern Gothic tales.
The real history became superseded by fictional legend: “a form of cultural amnesia, because Americans don’t like to face their real history; fictional stories drag us away from facing reality,” as one interviewee states. Vampires uses the fiction of D’Hemecourt to tell the actual stories it wants to impart about the metaphorical vampires of New Orleans: corporate tourism replacing the soul of New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina; incarcerated labor as modern slavery, multi-generational poor communities turned into modern plantations. It may throw audiences expecting a more conventional vampire tale, but it’s rewarding for those willing to set expectations aside and go with the flow. The performances are good (most of the cast are veterans of Sudbury Devil). The length might be an issue for some, but the film doesn’t drag, helped immensely by Dillon Derosa’s score, which is as epic as the scope of the film.
The Vampires Of New Orleans is available to rent or buy via Atun-Shei Films’ website, and will drop on YouTube on 10/31: Halloween.
I think this movie is weirder than average
I think this movie is better than average