Forget the chainsaw-we're not in Texas anymore. And steak knives are so passé.
Instead, director Tobe Hooper maintains that a few grocery items are all it takes to vanquish an oozing zombie: red Twizzlers to calm them, gurgling black soup to win them over and a fistful of rock salt to finish them off.
So it goes in Mortuary, the latest camp-and-gorefest from Hooper, director of Poltergeist and Texas Chainsaw Massacre. His new film follows a family of three as they move to rural California, set up house in a ramshackle funeral home and subsequently battle their friendly neighborhood monsters.
Doesn't exactly evoke the old Romero zeitgeist, but for an excuse to hug your neighbor this Valentine's Day weekend, Hooper's creature feature fills the bill.
Yet the Carolina Theatre's Nevermore Film Festival, where Mortuary will make its North Carolina debut, tosses such freak-out films in the mix with bizarre Asian action flicks, period ghost stories and psychological thrillers. Horrifically enough, it works.
Now in its seventh year of hosting Nevermore, the Carolina estimates it will sell 2,500 tickets this weekend for its slate of 10 full-length features and eight shorts. Several directors, including those behind the films Within, Dark Remains, and SIGMA will be floating around-a few are scheduled to give their films' introductions and hold informal Q&A sessions with audiences.
But the beauty of the festival, despite its limitation to one genre, is in the heterogenity of its selections. "We get an idea of how many good films we can include, and then we cut titles," said Jim Carl, senior director of the theater. "You don't want too many ghost stories, too many Asian horror stories, too many slasher films. Not everything should be so brooding and self-serious."
Carl's logic, along that of fellow programmer and Cinema Operations Manager Phil Seib, is the reason why a movie like Death Trance, a strung-together series of martial arts fight scenes, can coexist with a film like SIGMA-a head-scratching thriller shot entirely from the perspective of surveillance cameras.
And like so much of horror, often viewed as a commentary on what's scary in society, Nevermore's showing tells us what's creepiest in the minds of writers and directors from Nigeria to Los Angeles.
Hooper, for one, pinpoints small-town America-there's nothing more frightening than über-conservative law enforcement, teen pregnancy and drug-addled kids. You're almost glad to see the zombies wipe 'em out.
Meanwhile, director Dave Gebroe, the mastermind behind noir-humored Zombie Honeymoon, said having one-half of a pair of vegetarian newlyweds suffer the bite of a zombie-and the ensuing marital strife as the husband craves human flesh-is scary as hell.
Put that scene to Tammy Wynette's country classic "Stand By Your Man," and the tongue resting in Gebroe's cheek is a little more evident.
"This is drama-how would you really react if your loved one became a zombie?" Carl said. "It's In the Bedroom-except with zombies."
Our take?
Muahahaha.
The Nevermore Film Festival will take place Feb. 17 to 19 at the Carolina Theatre of Durham, 309 West Morgan St. For information tickets and showtimes, visit www.carolinatheatre.org or call the box office at (919) 560-3030.
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