New avenues for fantasy and horror: nostalgia, nihilism and quirky malevolence

Imagine has been transforming for several years. When this festival was still going around the world under the name Amsterdam Fantastic Film Festival, its main focus was on genre cinema. The Fantatstic-genre is an insidious term used as a catch-all for science fiction, fantasy and horror. In these postmodern times fantatstic more difficult to delineate. The festival therefore changed its name back in 2009. In 2013, it also changed location. From various cinemas in Amsterdam's city centre, each with their own homey atmosphere, it moved to the imposing but less intimate film palace EYE.

This year's programme showed that the gap between genre film and arthouse has faded a little further again. Films such as Patricia Rozema's Into the forest and Stephen Fingletons The Survivalist provide an alternative interpretation of the now flattened post-apocalyptic screenplay by focusing not on spectacle, but rather on intimate and psychological details. The psychological thriller The Invitation by Karyn Kusama, with a small role by our hunk Michiel Huisman, begins as an awkward get-together between old friends and lovers over dinner. As in the arthouse classic Festen appearances are slowly shattered. Then again, the sinister intentions that slowly become palpable are more befitting of a horror film.

This is exemplary of Imagine's current offering, at a time when a discerning audience seeks entertainment and depth in equal portions. That omnivorous film love is striking among festival-goers who are familiar with the film canon, who go to the cinema, but who also grew up with genre cinema and will never forget that first love.

80s nostalgia

The blending of "serious" cinema with unabashed childhood sentiment was still best seen in Midnight Special by Jeff Nichols. Nichols is a director who is in the same age bracket as the average Imagine visitor (between 30 and 40). He made a name for himself among critics with small-scale independent films about fragile family ties in the southern US such as Shotgun Stories and Take Shelter. Actor Michael Shannon was a regular feature in it. Nichols was indebted in his film style to Terrence Malick's grand pastoral atmosphere. So lots of beautiful wide shots of the American landscape, in unreal twilight.

Midnight Special uses the same palette, evoking a similar atmosphere. However, the story is a slight variation of Sci-Fi classics such as Spielberg's E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial and Close encounters of the third kind which produced a whole series of imitators in the 1980s such as John Carpenters Starman and Simon Wincers D.A.R.Y.L. It must have been those films Nichols saw in his youth because their narrative and stylistic elements pertinently recur in Midnight Special.

A mysterious boy with supernatural powers is kidnapped by two men. The army and secret agents begin a manhunt when it turns out that all sorts of inexplicable things are happening that were triggered by the child. Michael Shannon plays one of the kidnappers, who also turns out to be the boy's worried father. Nichols has deliberately kept the story simple as if he assumes the viewer has the right knowledge based on familiar genre conventions to fill in all the plot holes. This works in part and Midnight Special retains a tension in its first half that sucks you right into the story.

Nichols is not the first director to show after small and intimate films that he can handle bigger productions. Independent directors such as Rian Johnson (Brick), Colin Trevorrow (Safety not guaranteed) and Gareth Edwards (Samples) also initially made small and quirky films, only to plunge into mega-projects like the Star Wars, Jurassic Park and Godzilla franchises. Secretly, many indie-directors nevertheless to follow in the footsteps of Spielberg and Lucas. You suspect the same of Nichols if you go by the frequent use of lens flare, the pumping and menacing soundtrack that John Carpenter could have composed. The spectacular but sadly disappointing ending of Midnight Special leaves little to the imagination. It proves once again that the cinema of your youth remains the ultimate frame of reference.

Nihilistic perspective

Hardcore Henry shows the fascinations of the younger generation of filmmakers who grew up with video games, ultra-violence and the internet. Russian director Ilya Naishuller stood out with the violent and sensational clip for his rock band Biting Elbows. That was shot entirely from the first person. He also collaborated as a writer on the video game Payday 2. This background explains the adrenaline-fuelled approach for his debut Hardcore Henry. That film was also shot from the first person and is immediately reminiscent of the First-person shooter game genre where you - with an arsenal of weapons - shoot your way from one level to the next. You can expect that depth from the story, too. A clone with cybernetic limbs flees the lab where he was manufactured and tries to unravel his past. Meanwhile, he seeks revenge. This deliberately ludicrous premise is padded by Naishuller with a chock-full of explosions and tit-for-tat, with a little bit of comic relief Of actor Sharlto Copley serving as sidekick.

The film has already been mercilessly dismissed by critics, but has also spawned a bevy of fans who see hope for the future of action cinema in Naishuller. It must be said that Naishuller technically knows what he is doing. The choreographed mayhem of the action scenes is well thought out and has the aggressive and rigged pace of a computer game. Certain scenes also clearly allude to the messed-up modus operandi of many shooters: shooting opponents through the head, quickly reloading weapons and throwing hand grenades to fight your way through the war zone. All this while bullets whiz past you.

Hardcore Henry will be shocking to many a serious film viewer because of its nihilistic violence, although the film does not try to justify it all. Such good versus bad logic, which you often see in American films, is missing. It is an irresponsible fever dream of an adolescent adhd-er who has just had a sugar overdose. No wonder the end result smacks of sensationalism and the sweaty excitement of a rollercoaster ride.

Or Hardcore Henry actually means a new path within genre cinema remains to be seen. In 1997, director Jonas Åkerlund used the same perspective for his music video for Prodigy's Smack my Bitch up. That one caused a lot of controversy at the time, but you don't hear from Åkerlund now. Furthermore, there are not many other examples within film history that sustain the perspective for the whole ride. You have the failed Lady in the Lake from 1947 and Gaspar Noe's Enter the Void from 2009. Perhaps the Oculus Rift and similar technologies could make first-person perspective more accessible to a wider audience, but are we still talking about cinema?

Quirky malice

The most impressive films at Imagine were the titles that managed to transcend the boundaries of film genres through their quirky and chilling atmosphere. The Witch was above all a unique viewing experience in the process. Robert Eggers' haunting film is set in the America just being explored by English settlers. A family is exiled from a settlement and ends up in the dark and unknown forests of the New World. The religious father works hard on the barren land, but the family experiences macabre things. Gradually, the family falls apart in bloody ways, while the eldest daughter seems to undergo a dark transformation.

The power of The Witch is mainly in that strange atmosphere Eggers manages to evoke through a combination of shadowy images, beautiful costumes and old English dialogue. He gives credible form to an unknown and dark time without compromising the mystery of the past. Out of this expertly constructed mystery gradually sprouts the evil and diabolical heart of the film.

A film that is just as powerful, but leans more towards arthouse traditions is the Polish Demon by Marcin Wrona, who sadly committed suicide after making the film. The film follows Jewish Piotr who is getting married in Poland and travels to his bride's village. As he prepares for the big day, uncontrollable forces from the past surface in the old house where the wedding party is being held.

Demon takes Poland's traumatic history as the starting point for a supernatural ghost story. Yet the film is more than horror. Wrona manages to capture the wild Polish bridal party naturalistically and his cast portrays the characters lifelike. As the vodka flows richly, the atmosphere becomes grimmer. Poland's past appears to be written in blood. The earlier realism gives way to wry symbolism and disturbing, surreal scenes. A shocking transition that Wrona deploys confidently, placing him in a tradition of Polish directors such as Polanski, Zulawski and Skolimowski. His death is therefore all the more a tragic loss of an emerging film talent whose idiosyncrasy transcends all pigeonholes.