Angus Scrimm recites a list of yummy Halloween treats, but something is a bit off… This short by 366 fave Graham Reznick celebrates “the euphoria of the Halloween candy score… and the paranoia of the Halloween candy predator…”
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As our own Pamela De Graff likes to say, everyone out there have an unsafe and insane Halloween!
We celebrate the season a little bit differently around these parts. Please enjoy this disturbing tribute to the holidays from I Can See You‘s Graham Reznick. It features a creepy doll with perpetually downturned eyes, graphics and sound that are reminiscent of a “Sesame Street” segment, and irrational Satanic rituals.
This short, along with Voltaire’s X-Mess Detritus, was part of Beck Underwood’s “Creepy Christmas” project. There’s plenty more where these came from, so please visit the Creepy Christmas site to see all 25 films!
And have a very creepy Christmas!
Graham Reznick is the director of the extremely weird 2008 feature I Can See You, described as “a psychedelic campfire tale” and certified by us as one of the 366 Best Weird Movies of All Time. Graham’s personal homepage is here, and you can find I Can See You‘s official site here. [UPDATE 3/11/2011: Just over a year later, we note that three of Graham’s suggestions—Performance, Altered States and Hausu—have been certified as among the weirdest of all time, with more to come, we’re sure.]
I am honored to have been asked to provide a list of Weird Movies for 366 Weird Movies.com! For my list, I decided I would compile a group of weird films that I always feel like watching, no matter what my mood, or how many times I’ve seen them. They may not be the “best” movies, or even the strangest—but they all contain at least a touch of the sublime (except, perhaps, #10), and they’re all my favorite weird films. Many of these I saw when I was young, and are major influences on my own work and approach to filmmaking. Some may not, at first glance, even seem that weird—but I hope within this context you’ll be able to enjoy and appreciate them for the inherent weirdness that they contain!
Listed in no particular order:
1) PERFORMANCE (Donald Cammell and Nic Roeg, 1968-70, UK)
It’s hard to even describe what makes this movie so special. A gangster on the run hides out with a formerly passionate rock star (Mick Jagger in his first, and perhaps best, role) in swingin’ 60’s London. Sounds simple, but it’s so wrought with the cultural tensions of 1968 that it becomes an ultra dense diamond of sheer psychedelic freak out. Several viewings encouraged!
2) TWIN PEAKS: FIRE WALK WITH ME (David Lynch, 1994, USA)
I could probably put Lynch’s entire catalogue on here so for simplicity’s sake I’ll just pick one. I oscillate daily on my favorite David Lynch movie/production, yet more often than not I end up here: FIRE WALK WITH ME was the first Lynch film I saw, when I was about 13, and it was the first time I understood that movies could be weird AND good. If you’ve seen the show, this movie is NOT like the show. The show can GET dark at times, while exploring the wake left in a troubled teen’s death, but this film is DIRECTLY FROM the subjective, paranoid, and dysfunctionally emotional perspective of that troubled teen – in the six days leading up to her death. It is the HEART of the mystery that forms the show, and it’s an amazing experience that can at once be read as a strange criss-crossing of inter-dimensional signals, or a beautifully moving metaphor for harrowing sexual molestation. It’s never failed to give me chills.
3) VIDEODROME (David Cronenberg, 1983, CANADA)
“Because it has something that you don’t have, Max. It has a philosophy. And that is Continue reading GRAHAM REZNICK’S 10 FAVORITE WEIRD FILMS
“I CAN SEE YOU is a film about the thing that frightens me the most… my own mind… we as sentient human beings are completely at the mercy of an organ that we may never fully understand; an organ that, at the slightest malfunction, can throw our perception of reality into such chaos and confusion that we will never see or experience the world the same way again.”–Graham Reznick, from the Director’s Statement for I Can See You
DIRECTED BY: Graham Reznick
FEATURING: Ben Dickinson, Larry Fessenden, Duncan Skiles
PLOT: Ben is a nearsighted, neurotic and painfully shy photographer/artist working for an advertising start-up firm looking to land a huge contract for the ClarActix corporation. The three twenty-something admen organize a camping trip to snap nature photos that can be used in the campaign. At a campfire hootenanny, Ben meets a beautiful hippie girl he once had a crush on, and his awkward attempts to romance the free-spirited girl lead him to an internal breakdown that manifests itself in a series of unnerving surrealistic montages.
BACKGROUND:
INDELIBLE IMAGE: Relying as it does on the montage style for its unsettling effect, I Can See You is filled with memorable imagery. The briefly seen double-image of Ben is sublimely creepy, so much so that a variation of it was used for the original movie poster (unhappily abandoned in favor of a forgettable still of Ben shaving for the DVD release). It’s Ben’s unfinished, faceless portrait of his father, however, which recurs several times in different contexts, that is the film’s most important visual symbol. If you stare at the painting long enough you can make out tiny indications of eyes and a mouth, which makes the picture even more uncanny than pure blank flesh would be.
WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: I Can See You is one of the trippiest, druggiest movies to come
down the pike since the psychedelic Sixties; the last sequence plays like a twenty-minute, long-take hallucination shot on location inside Ben’s splintered mind.
COMMENTS: I Can See You‘s strategy is to slowly build up a storehouse of images, then Continue reading 41. I CAN SEE YOU (2008)