Artwork by Chris Bilheimer
Me, upon waking up Saturday morning: “I could use a light entry into the screenings today. I hope the choice I made yesterday is kind of tame.”
Checks phone; sees first screening is titled Flesheater.
Also me: “Well, shit.”
Day three was the first day I didn’t leave the theater for the entire day, apart from stepping outside to get some fresh air between screenings. I arrived at 11am and didn’t leave until almost twelve hours later. One of the great things about a film festival at Alamo Drafthouse is access to a full menu for every screening, meaning you never have to leave to get food.
The first catch of the day was an absolute treat. As previously mentioned, it was for a film called Flesheater. Made in 1988, it was written, directed, produced, and co-edited by a man named Bill Hinzman. Most famous for playing the first zombie to appear in Night of the Living Dead, Flesheater – sometimes subtitled as Revenge of the Living Zombies – was the second of only two films Hinzman directed.
The lore has it that a fan recognized Hinzman at a horror convention, and the actor-cum-director was inspired by the moment to make a quasi-sequel to George Romero’s archetype for the modern zombie movie. His film has a quaint low-budget, DIY feel that attains moments of being charming, in between all the cannibalism and exploitation nudity.
Things get kicked off when a man working in a remote wooded area unwittingly unearths the grave of the character Hinzman portrayed in Night of the Living Dead. (It’s a different actor who is kind-of, sort-of made up to look like the iconic cemetery ghoul.) The man finds the grave, marked with a mysterious incantation, after bringing a group of college students to the area for a camping trip via a hayride on Halloween.
A few questions might arise in your mind after reading that description. How does this guy not know – along with the rest of the world – exactly where this body is buried, considering it led to a catastrophe of flesh-eating zombies only twenty years ago. Surely everyone knows what these creatures are and how to destroy them.
We’re never expressly told this is the first zombie from Living Dead. We’re meant to infer it (I think) from the similar look of both characters. No one in this world seems to remember this undead apocalypse, as half the movie is spent relearning the lessons from the original film.
The most interesting thing about Flesheater is the way it switches back and forth between two popular horror subgenres of the time. The first half of the movie operates exactly like a slasher movie. The zombies kill using things other than their teeth – like a pitchfork – mimicking slasher movie maniacs. The horny kids in the woods follow the, by then, firmly established “fuck and die” trope of slasher movies.
After the first wave of terror, the surviving members of the camping party find a house and set about reinforcing it to keep the ghouls out. You can almost hear the movie switching gears from slasher movie into a proper zombie movie. The monsters even switch exclusively to biting their victims.
What makes Flesheater so much fun to enjoy ironically is its ineptness at any kind of coherent storytelling. There is virtually no plot to speak of apart from various groups of people doing banal and mundane things before being set upon by the zombies. Every 15 or 20 minutes, we’re introduced to a new stable of victims – one is a family getting ready for Trick-or-Treating, another is a different group of young people throwing a party in a barn – with no introduction or explanation of who these new characters are.
There is a perfect example that encapsulates how incompetent the writing is. The mother of two young kids calls upstairs to her teenage daughter. She needs her daughter to watch the kids so she can finish with the Trick-or-Treat preparations. I’ll have to paraphrase, but the mom says something to the effect of, “I need you to come down and watch the kids until my husband gets home.” Wait, is her husband not also her daughter’s father? Why wouldn’t she say “your dad,” or “your stepdad,” if that’s the case? Is this teenager – who was showering (as a way for the movie to ensure she’s naked every time we see her) upstairs – the babysitter? I think it’s simply an example of screenwriter Hinzman not thinking through how members of a family talk to each other.
There are a slew of so-bad-it’s-good moments like this. The filmmakers took great pains to add Foley sound effects any time any character touches hay – the movie takes place in rural Pennsylvania, so there is a lot of hay – and the exact same sound effect is used to enhance the sound of the previously mentioned teenager as she dries her body with a towel and wraps it around herself after her shower.
Certain of the cast members clearly firmly believe that the amount and volume of their breathing holds a direct correlation to the amount of terror their character is experiencing. Most of the cast have thick accents; I was convinced Kate Winslet used Flesheater as a resource for her hoagie mouth accent in Mare of Easttown.
(As someone who didn’t grow up there, but who’s entire family is originally from the WV-Ohio-Pennsylvania boarder region, I get a sense of nostalgia for family vacations to that region every time I hear the hoagie mouth accent.)
Flesheater is fun and goofy and awful enough to make for a great party movie for the Halloween season. I might try to work it into the rotation now that I’ve experienced it firsthand.
The second screening of the day was the first big disappointment of the fest for me. It was a documentary by French filmmaker Daphné Baiwir called King on Screen. It’s a collection of interviews from filmmakers who have adapted the works of Stephen King for movies and TV. Baiwir crafts pure hagiography here. If you knew nothing about Stephen King before seeing the film, you would assume he is an absolute saint.
The most troubling thing about that approach is that the movie completely ignores all of the very problematic things about King’s writing when it comes to race – the medium post Stephen King Needs More Black Friends by Scott Woods is an excellent primer on this subject – while going out of its way to shore up his reputation in other areas, like writing female characters.
King on Screen dedicates a significant amount of its 75 minutes to praising The Green Mile, the most virulent example of one of King’s favorite tropes, the Magical Negro character. The Magical Negro is a trope of storytelling that includes a beatific Black character whose sole purpose is to enlighten and help the white protagonist grow as a person and/or complete the hero’s journey, sometimes – as is the case in The Green Mile – with the help of actual magical abilities. I was a massive Stephen King fan in high school, so I’m confident in my bona fides in this area. To paraphrase Winston Zeddemore from Ghostbusters, when it comes to certain passages of King’s The Dark Tower series involving a central Black character, I could show you shit that would turn you white as far as stereotyped dialog of how white people think Black people speak.
There is virtually no mention made of King’s multi-dimensional, genre-busting, seven+ volume opus The Dark Tower. That’s presumably because the one cinematic adaptation of that work was a colossal critical and financial flop, and Baiwir probably didn’t want to bring us all down. Also conspicuously missing is talk of King’s own directorial screen adaptation of his work, the box office bomb and King’s self-described “moron movie,” Maximum Overdrive.
Overall, the documentary feels like a fan video meant for YouTube instead of any sort of real probing of King’s work. At one point, someone refers to King as an actual prophet, because his novel The Stand imagines our society brought to its knees by a global pandemic. Never mind that there was another global pandemic in 1918 that King could have easily researched for his book, no prophetic abilities needed.
There is an inventive and satisfying – especially for hardcore King fans – prologue to the film in which Baiwir creates a cinematic landscape positively stuffed with King literary references. It’s meticulously made, but, like the rest of her film, is nothing more than fan service. Baiwir secured a few big names in filmmaking (like Frank Darabont) and King-specific screen adaptations (like Mick Garris) for her picture. The majority of the movie, though, is a relentless montage of these talking head interviews which become tiresome considering they offer no real insight into King other than how awesome he is.
I ended up wishing I had skipped this screening for another one I was looking forward to that might or might not be screening again (I need to check).
I’m going to keep my powder dry on the other two movies I screened yesterday, as I want the opportunity to really wrestle with them for longer-form reviews. I should be able to get back around to them, as they’re two of the biggest anticipated releases of the Fall 2022 movie season: Martin McDonagh’s The Banshees of Inisherin and Park Chan-wook’s Decision to Leave.
I’m also going to make this the last post of my Fantastic Fest coverage. I want to enjoy my first-ever film festival without the pressure of getting these posts together every morning before rushing to get ready for the next set of screenings. If you want to see what else I’m watching and (at the least) star ratings for each title, head over to my Letterboxd profile for a full accounting of my continuing Fantastic Fest adventures!