Remodeling the Fantastic

A week before Fantastic Fest 2023 opening night, the Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar location where the fest normally takes place was a mess. In July of this year, Alamo Drafthouse began a remodeling of the location, promising new reclining chairs, bathroom updates, and a whole new theater.

That new theater now connects to the existing theaters through a new conduit hallway styled to look like a corridor in the infamous Overlook Hotel from Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining,  complete with a “Here’s Johnny” photo op in a splintered door, a fake elevator door with projected blood splashes, and a sign over the new theater designating it as “Room 237.”

The rest of the cineplex also bears Kubrick-themed decorations and callouts. An entire wall proudly displays Mondo posters of Kubrick’s films, another wall features a facsimile of the HAL 9000 computer from 2001: A Space Odyssey, and there’s a replica of the bomb from Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb positioned in front of a massive black and white aerial photo of Austin, Texas. Somehow, miraculously Alamo Drafthouse had this all finished in time for Fantastic Fest opening night on September 21^st.

Fantastic Fest and the Alamo Drafthouse certainly set out to impress festival goers with the remodel, but this year’s programming was the real star of the show. The fest boasted four secret screenings rather than the usual two. Emerald Fennell’s follow-up to Promising Young Woman, Saltburn, was the first secret screening and a fest favorite for its skin-crawling performance by Barry Keoghan — like, even more skin-crawling than usual for him. Dream Scenario starring Nicolas Cage, Luc Besson’s divisive Dogman starring Caleb Landry Jones, and Saw X rounded out the rest of the secret screenings.

Director Daniel Bandeire’s Brazilian thriller Property took home the best picture award in the main competition for features, while ‘Infested’ from Sébastien Vaniček took the prize for best horror. If you asked attendees, the standout horror films this year were When Evil Lurks out of Argentina and the Adams Family’s ambitious follow-up to their debut Hellbender, Where the Devil Roams. Festival programmers touted the former as the scariest film of the year; it’s hard to argue with that, given the film’s over-the-top and imaginative violence. The latter seems like a step up in budget, but astonishingly the Adams Family funded it themselves and filmed it near their home.

Standouts in comedy this year included River, Killing Romance, and The Coffee Table. River is from director Junta Yamaguchi and the Kikaku Theatre Group out of Japan. Fest programmers pointed out in the film’s introduction that this was the only film in the fest to earn a tag of “a movie with heart.” If you’re at all familiar with this group’s previous sci-fi comedy Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes you can expect something even bigger and better with just as many laughs.

Killing Romance split some sides as a musical comedy out of Korea starring Lee Ha-nee and Lee Sun-kyun about a young actress trapped in an abusive marriage who enlists the president of her fan club to help her escape it. I haven’t laughed that hard in a theater since Bottoms.

The Coffee Table is as dark as dark comedies come and will certainly not leave you laughing. Director Caya Casas proudly wore the badge of this being labeled the cruelest film of the fest in his spirited Q&A after the film screened. The premise is a young couple with a newborn baby have a spat over the purchase of a garish glass coffee table. The husband wants it. The wife is dead-wet on making the husband miserable for buying it. The coffee table itself is then responsible for tragedy. The dark comedy comes in with the increasing difficulty of covering up the tragedy.

In the sci-fi category, UFO Sweden generated buzz as a heartfelt and impressive throwback to plucky 90s sci-fi action flicks, while The Creator and Divinity satiated those looking for something more visually impressive or experimental, respectively.

Rounding out the rest of the fest, Strange Darling is a serial killer thrill ride that will continue to generate buzz but also remain enigmatic. Seek it out and go into it with patience for its non-linear narrative structure and an open mind for its troubling content. Vera Drew’s autobiographical conversation starter The People’s Joker played as a midnighter at the fest, supplying an infusion of punk rock sensibility at the midway point. Finally, the closing night film Totally Killer killed. The opening night film The Toxic Avenger not so much.

Fantastic Fest prides itself on chaos and bonkers programming, but perhaps this year showed that this genre fest is starting to grow up a bit and offer a wealth of darlings across many subgenres. Don’t count on this fest ever giving up its wild side, though. After all, all work and no play makes Fantastic Fest a dull boy.

(cover photo: Fantastic Fest’s Opening Night Party as guests pose with Troma Films founder Lloyd Kaufman. Credit: Heather Kennedy)