White chamber - English premiere at Frightfest 2018
Aviary Films are hugely excited to announce that 'White Chamber' will have its English Premiere at the Prince Charles Cinema Leicester Square on Sunday 26th August as part of the world-famous genre film institution that is Frightfest!
Anton bitel
White chamber - Frightfest preview
Political panic: the timeliest terrors at FrightFest 2018
Many of the best films at this year’s London horror festival reflect our uneasiest concerns about fake news and bad government – uncomfortable viewing for a turbulent age.
Anton Bitel
6 August 2018
As the genre which most gets under the viewer’s skin, horror has to needle us at our points of greatest vulnerability. It is for this reason that horror’s on-screen fictions so often reflect very real anxieties that already exist in the viewer – not just deep-rooted, perennial fears of sudden loud noises or darkness or predation, but also more contemporary concerns about the world we live in, abuses of power, and our precarious relation to others. This is what might broadly be called the political dimension of horror, and explains why, for example, so many genre films in the late 60s and early 70s were informed by America’s civil rights movement at home or Vietnamese excursions abroad, or why ‘rage’ viruses and torture porn loomed so large in the post-9/11 era of mass unfocused anger and external rendition. Put simply, horror thrives in troubled times.
We are, of course, in the middle of a particularly turbulent age right now, as Trump’s occupancy of the White House, the creeping approach of Brexit, the rise of fake news and the manipulations of the internet, all spread uncertainty and consternation through the viewing public. So one might expect at least some of the 70 features screening at this year’s FrightFest, the UK’s largest festival of horror, science fiction and fantasy, to prod and poke at present political anxieties in their audience. Here is a selection of films from the programme. I really like all nine of these titles for different reasons – but what unifies them is the dark, distorting mirror that each holds to situations and events in the real world.
White Chamber
Paul Raschid, UK
Set in a United – yet divided – Kingdom of the near future, Paul Raschid’s film is a literal chamber piece, confining all the complexities and contradictions of internecine strife to a single secret weapons research facility, and to the white-lit test/torture room within, where captives are pushed to and beyond the normal limits of physical endurance. With both sides of a vicious civil conflict equally convinced of their own righteousness and looking not just for mere victory but for personal, bestial vendetta, a time-leaping narrative structure interrogates the viewer’s prejudices, turning the tables on our moral orientation to reveal the double game that almost everyone here is playing. Meanwhile, those stuck in the middle who point out the unethical nature of others’ behaviour find themselves threatened with charges of treason. White Chamber is best seen in the context of a Britain that is currently riven by issues of class, race and (especially) Brexit, with everyone entrenched in their views, and no signs of acceptable compromise in sight. It grimly foreshadows a lose/lose situation.
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Political panic: the timeliest terrors at FrightFest 2018