Author Archives: surgeons of horror

A Film in Pieces: The Production Chaos Behind the Curtain

06 Saturday Sep 2025

Posted by in retrospective

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

, , , , , ,

Few films wear their fractures quite as elegantly as The Phantom of the Opera (1925). Though now revered as one of the great achievements of silent horror, its making was less a symphony and more a cacophony—directorial disputes, shifting visions, endless recuts, and one star whose iron will was often the only anchor. What remains is a beautiful Frankenstein of a film: stitched together from studio desperation, creative conflict, and a flair for the dramatic that defined Universal’s golden age.

A Phantom Director

At the heart of the chaos lies Rupert Julian, a theatre-trained actor and journeyman director whose name appears in the credits but whose influence over the final product remains… spectral. His clashes with Lon Chaney were legendary—Chaney, a fiercely creative force with a precise vision for his characters, often refused to take direction. On many days, Julian wouldn’t even speak directly to his star. Chaney, for his part, reportedly directed his own scenes, shaping the Phantom’s pathos and menace through sheer stubborn artistry.

Whether due to these tensions or his own shortcomings, Julian was eventually removed from the project. Universal scrambled to salvage the shoot. Enter Edward Sedgwick and Ernst Laemmle—each brought in at various stages to shoot new material or repair narrative dead ends. Sedgwick, known for his comedic work with Buster Keaton, tried to inject romance and levity into the film’s darker recesses. Laemmle, nephew of Universal head Carl Laemmle, became something of a patchwork foreman, attempting to unify divergent pieces into a marketable whole.

Cut, Recut, and Re-Resurrected

What emerged from this creative scrum was hardly a singular vision. In fact, multiple versions of The Phantom of the Opera circulated for years—each with different edits, intertitles, and even actors in key roles (notably Mary Philbin’s love interest Raoul, portrayed alternately by Norman Kerry or with reshot scenes from another actor in certain reissues).

The most infamous moment of this production patchwork is the film’s ending. Early audiences reacted so poorly to the original climax—where Erik dies quietly of a broken heart—that Universal commissioned a new, action-packed chase ending. Chaney, unsurprisingly, refused to return. His absence forced the crew to use stand-ins and quick cuts, adding to the jagged quality of the film’s finale. For decades, this dual-ending oddity haunted film restorers, and only recent efforts have brought some cohesion to the film’s various prints.

The Phantom Temple: Universal’s Monument to Cinema

Despite the chaos, The Phantom of the Opera gave birth to one of Universal’s most iconic achievements: the Paris Opera House set. Designed by Charles D. Hall, and built to full scale on Stage 28, the massive structure was a marvel of studio engineering—five stories tall with working elevators, staircases, and backstage corridors that would feature in countless Universal productions for decades.

More than just a backdrop, the Opera House became the architectural heart of the film, its labyrinthine design mirroring Erik’s twisted psyche. From the grand chandelier to the shadowy catacombs below, this set symbolised the collision of artifice and emotion—a stage on which the tragic grotesque could play out with operatic grandeur.

Universal’s marketing team leaned hard into this opulence. Pre-release promotions touted the realism and scale of the set, and Chaney’s grotesque makeup was shrouded in secrecy to fuel curiosity. When the curtain finally rose, audiences were not just watching a movie—they were stepping into a cinematic cathedral, built from horror and heartbreak.

  • Saul Muerte

Shadows and Stylization: German Expressionism’s Influence on The Phantom of the Opera

The Opera House as Gothic Temple: Set Design, Architecture, and Symbolism

05 Friday Sep 2025

Posted by in retrospective

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

, , , , ,

Where shadows soar higher than the notes, and the arches echo with madness and music.

In the cavernous belly of the Palais Garnier, or rather its meticulously conjured phantom-double built on the Universal backlot, the silent Phantom of the Opera found its true cathedral—a place not of God, but of grotesquery, grandeur, and unrelenting gaze. For what is the Phantom’s lair, if not a sanctum sanctimonious of shattered beauty and compulsive longing?

Let us wander, as pilgrims through a fever dream, into the vast Gothic temple imagined by art director Ben Carré and production designer Charles D. Hall. A symphony of arches and shadows, their work was no mere recreation of Parisian opulence—it was a psychogeographic descent. An opera house turned labyrinth, a cathedral turned prison. Here, the verticality of Gothic design—spires, vaults, and vertiginous staircases—mirrors Erik’s own internal torment, reaching upward as he himself remains trapped below.

The architecture is storytelling in stone and plaster. The grand chandelier, both crown and executioner, becomes a symbol of suspended doom—until, like Icarus’ own sun, it falls. The Phantom’s subterranean realm, a gondola ride through the river Styx, contrasts wildly with the opulence above, reflecting the split psyche of a man who once longed to rise into the light but has become a ghost to the living world.

This set is no static background—it is character. It breathes. It swallows Christine. It trembles under the weight of Erik’s rage. It is built to oppress and awe, to reinforce the theme of duality: the sacred versus the profane, beauty versus deformity, the world above and the hell below.

Indeed, the set design would influence Gothic horror cinema for generations. From James Whale’s Frankenstein laboratories to Hammer’s cryptic corridors, echoes of this opera house reverberate through time like an eternal organ chord. Even Andrew Lloyd Webber’s stage musical, in all its bombastic decadence, cannot resist homage—his falling chandelier and boat of dreams a direct inheritance from Julian’s silent blueprint.

And what of the symbolism? The opera house is society, masked and gilded. Erik, the phantom, is its consequence—an aberration bred from its basements. The corridors are arteries of repression. The mirror through which Christine vanishes is not an illusionist’s trick—it is a metaphor for entering the subconscious, for embracing what polite society denies.

We watch the opera, and the opera watches us. It is voyeurism gilded in red velvet. And in Lon Chaney’s grim visage—revealed in a set piece that plays like a liturgical unmasking—we are reminded that all sacred spaces have their demons.

As one wanders through this haunted edifice, the sensation is clear: The Phantom of the Opera is not merely set in a gothic opera house. It is one.

  • Saul Muerte

A Film in Pieces: The Production Chaos Behind the Curtain

A Cathedral of Sound and Silence: The Importance of Music in a Silent Masterpiece

04 Thursday Sep 2025

Posted by in retrospective

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

, , , , ,

—Where silence screamed, and the organ wept blood

To enter the Paris Opera House of 1925 is to descend into a sanctuary sculpted not from stone, but from shadows and suggestion. And yet, for all the ghosts that lurk beneath its painted ceilings and velvet curtains, none are more commanding than the spectre of sound — or its absence.

For The Phantom of the Opera, a film birthed in the throes of the silent era, music was not mere accompaniment. It was divinity. A sacred ritual. The film’s heartbeat. Lon Chaney’s phantom did not snarl through dialogue — he sermonised through symphony. He seduced, stalked, and damned with each stroke of an organ key. And in those swelling, crashing waves of music, the silent screen screamed.

Let us not mistake silence for stillness. In the cathedral of Gaston Leroux’s tale — lovingly distorted through Rupert Julian’s dark lens — sound itself becomes a character, one more tragic and volatile than Christine Daaé or even the phantom himself. The Opera House, with its subterranean lake and sepulchral corridors, is a place where sound is distorted, echoing with the hollow resonance of unspoken longing and madness. The organ, that infernal machine, is not an instrument — it is confession, obsession, lamentation.

Original audiences would have heard the film accompanied by live orchestras or lone pianists, channeling the music through their fingertips like mediums at a séance. The film’s score changed depending on the theatre, the town, the mood of the maestro. No two showings were identical — each one a spiritual possession of the silver screen. Phantom was a living opera, rewritten by silence and breath.

And then — the sound version.

In 1930, Universal retrofitted the film with a synchronised soundtrack and dubbed vocals. Some praised it as a rebirth, but others felt the phantom’s spell was broken. A creature once made of candlelight and bone-rattling silence was now shackled to static dialogue and clumsy exposition. The cathedral had been wired for sound, and the ghosts recoiled.

And yet… the organ remained.

What power resides in that infernal instrument! As the phantom’s talons danced across the keys, it summoned more dread than any scream. No modern adaptation — be it Claude Rains with his acid-scarred face, Herbert Lom’s tortured composer, Robert Englund’s slasher-phantom, or even Andrew Lloyd Webber’s velvet-and-lace romanticism — has ever quite captured the awe of that thunderous silence punctuated by a single note. Modern phantoms speak too much. They are too human. Chaney’s phantom howled through melody. He became the music.

In the end, the 1925 Phantom is less a film and more a requiem mass. Its language is not English or French, but something deeper: the ancient dialect of pain, desire, and death, sung through bowstrings and ivory keys.

Let the record show — it was not silence that made The Phantom great.

It was the silence between the notes.

  • Saul Muerte

The Opera House as Gothic Temple: Set Design, Architecture, and Symbolism

Behind the Mask: Lon Chaney’s Transformation and Enduring Influence

03 Wednesday Sep 2025

Posted by in Uncategorized

≈ 1 Comment

By the flickering gaslight of memory, we descend into the catacombs…

In the vast mausoleum of cinema’s past, there lies a spectral figure whose face has haunted generations — not because it was seen, but because it was revealed. Lon Chaney, the Man of a Thousand Faces, was no mere actor; he was an alchemist of the grotesque, conjuring anguish and terror from wax and wire, shadow and silence. And in 1925, beneath the vaulted ceilings of the Paris Opera House — conjured on Universal’s backlot like a fever dream of Gothic excess — he achieved his magnum opus: The Phantom of the Opera.

Chaney’s transformation into Erik, the Opera Ghost, was no simple matter of greasepaint and prosthetics. Nay — this was a self-inflicted metamorphosis, a cruel devotional rite. He stretched his nostrils with fishhooks, pulled back his lips with piano wire, stuffed cotton into his cheeks and contorted his nose with collodion and spirit gum until he became the very spectre that Leroux’s fevered imagination had birthed. Witnesses on set reportedly recoiled in real terror. It was not performance — it was possession.

The result? A revelation. The reveal of Chaney’s ghastly visage in the catacombs remains one of the most seismic shocks in silent cinema — a jolt not merely of fright, but of empathy twisted by horror. His Phantom was not the debonair recluse we would come to see in later years, but a tragic wretch — equal parts Mephistopheles and martyr.

This duality, this tightrope walk between monstrous and misunderstood, laid the foundation upon which every subsequent Phantom would totter. Claude Rains, in the Technicolor sprawl of 1943, became the tragic artist disfigured by acid — his descent not from birth but from betrayal. Herbert Lom, in the blood-tinted grandeur of Hammer’s 1962 adaptation, leaned into melancholic villainy, a Phantom forged by society’s indifference. Robert Englund — ever the sadistic showman — sliced his way through the 1980s in a slasher-inflected fever dream. And of course, Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical wraith — perhaps the most culturally ubiquitous — swapped horror for high romance, crooning beneath the chandelier with yearning rather than rage.

Yet all of them, every last Phantom, owed a debt to Chaney.

His influence was not confined to narrative or design — it permeated cinema’s very DNA. The idea that the monster is also the victim, that the face behind the mask might inspire pity rather than revulsion — this was Chaney’s gospel. His Phantom is cinema’s first antihero in full — a sympathetic spectre long before capes and cowls became a genre of their own.

And let us not forget his legacy behind the lens. Chaney’s refusal to allow studio make-up artists near his face gave birth to the actor-as-architect — the performer who carves the mask himself. In his wake came Karloff, Lugosi, even Brando in his monstrous mumble. Every character actor who lost themselves in latex and madness owes a nod to the man who first made the grotesque beautiful.

He died in 1930, silenced by throat cancer before the talkies could claim his growl. But he remains eternal — not just in celluloid, but in spirit. Every time a horror film dares to ask us to empathise with the beast, every time a mask slips to reveal a wound, it is Chaney we are glimpsing beneath the flesh.

So raise your glass, dear reader, to the man who made the shadows sing. For behind every mask, there is pain. And behind that — if we dare look closely enough — there is Lon Chaney.

  • Saul Muerte

A Cathedral of Sound and Silence: The Importance of Music in a Silent Masterpiece

The Phantom’s Legacy: Adapting Gaston Leroux for the Silent Screen

01 Monday Sep 2025

Posted by in retrospective

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

, , ,

“The Opera is a house of masks, but none so compelling as the one that hides the soul.” —from the scribbled margins of a draft, circa 1924, stained with espresso and dreams.

Let us descend once more into the gilded oubliette of the Opéra Garnier, where velvet hangs heavy with secrets and the chandeliers hold their breath in anticipation of ghostly gossip. In 1910, French journalist-turned-dream-weaver Gaston Leroux birthed a monster swathed in shadows and romantic agony—a figure part Svengali, part Satan, and wholly misunderstood. Le Fantôme de l’Opéra, that grand gothic fable of unrequited obsession and subterranean song, was a strange beast even in its native tongue: a serialised novel crouched between mystery, melodrama, and psychological horror.

When Universal Pictures chose to adapt Leroux’s tale for the silent screen in 1925, they weren’t merely translating a story—they were transmuting a fever dream into myth. And like all alchemists worth their salt, they meddled with the materials, folding in terror where once lay tenderness, and igniting the monstrous sublime in the visages of the damned.

Julian’s Mad Alchemy

Director Rupert Julian, a man known as much for his temper as his eye, took Leroux’s moody manuscript and refashioned it into a celluloid nightmare. Gone was the subtle, spectral mystery of the novel. What emerged instead was operatic hysteria, thick with fog and madness. But it wasn’t Julian alone who summoned this vision. No, dear reader—Universal, then drunk on the success of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, had found its new martyr in Lon Chaney, a man who painted agony upon his face with wire, wax, and unparalleled commitment to the grotesque.

Chaney’s Erik, the Phantom, is no brooding poetic spectre but a living corpse in formal wear, his skeletal death’s-head revealed in a moment that shattered audience composure like glass beneath a soprano’s high C. This was not merely adaptation; it was desecration made divine. Leroux’s Erik, for all his cruelty, bore the weight of a man cursed with genius and ugliness in equal measure. Chaney’s was fury incarnate.

Shadows of Phantoms to Come

Let us now glance sidelong at those who followed in Erik’s bloodstained footsteps.

Claude Rains, in Universal’s 1943 Technicolor reimagining, shed the mask for pathos. His Phantom, a disfigured violinist, exchanged the menace of the catacombs for the melancholy of lost artistry. Herbert Lom’s portrayal in Hammer’s 1962 gothic rendition continued the tragic thread, giving us a Phantom less monstrous than misunderstood, soaked in tragic grandeur rather than terror. One might say he wore his heart on his sleeve—albeit a tattered one.

Then came the 1989 phantasmagoria starring Robert Englund, a gory operetta of flesh-sewing and devilish pacts, where Erik becomes a slasher icon rather than a tragic muse. It was opera filtered through entrails, a demonic waltz that traded velvet for viscera.

And what of Andrew Lloyd Webber? Ah yes, the maestro of chandelier-dropping Broadway spectacle. In 1986, he replaced horror with haunting. His Phantom crooned rather than cursed, seduced rather than stalked. The theatregoers swooned; the purists groaned. Webber’s Erik may wear the mask, but his face is that of a rockstar poet aching for connection, not control.

Endings, Altered and Abandoned

Leroux offered us an ending steeped in bittersweet resignation: Erik, dying of love, allows Christine to go free, her kiss redeeming him. But Julian and Universal flirted with alternate finales like a coquette at the masquerade. One ending saw Erik die of a broken heart in his lair, much like Leroux intended. Another had the mob deliver justice in the form of fists and fury beside the Seine, a brutish ballet of moral clarity that denied the Phantom any redemption.

Test audiences wrinkled their noses. Producers panicked. Re-shoots ensued. The film was recut, reordered, reimagined—somewhere between a romantic tragedy and a horror parade float. The final release was stitched together like Frankenstein’s monster, yet somehow, gloriously alive.

A Legacy in Echoes

So where does that leave us, a century hence, sipping wine and typing on laptops under the flicker of gaslamp mood lighting? The Phantom of the Opera remains an eternal figure—not because he terrifies, but because he represents that exquisite pain we dare not name. The ache of being unseen, unlovable, yet desperate to create beauty from ruin.

Julian’s adaptation may have strayed from Leroux’s elegant despair, but in doing so, it birthed a mythology of masks that still dances across stages and screens. Every Phantom since has chased that same note—half horror, half heartbreak. And in that echo, we find a truth as old as tragedy itself: beneath every monster lies a man with a broken song.

  • Saul Muerte

Behind the Mask: Lon Chaney’s Transformation and Enduring Influence

Phantom of the Opera (1925) Anthology – Introduction: A Century in the Shadows

01 Monday Sep 2025

Posted by in retrospective

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , ,

By moonlight and candle smoke, let us descend into the catacombs of time. There, amongst the cobwebbed corridors of cultural memory, a figure haunts us still—his name whispered on velvet drapes and echoed in opera houses long silenced. The Phantom of the Opera: a spectre born not of flesh alone but of longing, madness, and cinematic obsession. It is now a century since his shadow first flickered upon the silver screen, and yet his masked visage remains unforgotten, undiminished, and disturbingly intimate.

Permit me, dear reader, to wax poetic with ink black as midnight and sentiment heavy as incense in a Parisian crypt. This is no mere stroll through the decades, no dusty archival detour. What lies ahead is an exhumation—an ecstatic disinterment of film reels, fractured dreams, and fevered interpretations. Think of this as less historical treatise, more seance. A communion with the many faces of Erik, our melancholy maestro.

And oh, what faces he has worn: from the silent scream of Lon Chaney’s skull-like transformation to the velvet purr of Claude Rains, the bombast of Herbert Lom, the tragic pout of Robert Englund, and the rock-god theatrics of Gerard Butler. Each incarnation a mirror, cracked and trembling, reflecting the anxieties of its age. What began as Gaston Leroux’s pulp romance has since metastasised into a grand gothic opera of celluloid and shadow.

In this anthology, we shall waltz with these ghosts. We shall trace the inkblots of adaptation and mutation. We shall praise and pillory. We shall wonder aloud at the strange endurance of this story, and why it refuses to go gentle into that cinematic night.

For the Phantom is not merely a character. He is myth wearing greasepaint. He is trauma recast as melody. He is beauty disfigured and thus made eternal.

Join me. The curtain rises. The chandelier trembles. The century beckons.

  • Saul Muerte

The Phantom’s Legacy: Adapting Gaston Leroux for the Silent Screen

The Prophecy (1995): Heaven’s War, Earth’s Weirdness

31 Sunday Aug 2025

Posted by in retrospective

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

, , , , , ,

Gregory Widen’s The Prophecy is one of those mid-’90s supernatural thrillers that feels caught between the sacred and the schlocky. It leans heavily on biblical mythology, unpacks celestial civil war, and casts Christopher Walken as a renegade archangel—already a recipe for cult appeal. And yet, while its ambition sometimes outpaces its execution, the film still lingers in the memory nearly three decades later.

The plot hinges on a war in Heaven that has spilled onto Earth, with Gabriel (Walken) searching for a dark human soul that could tip the divine balance. Standing in his way are a former priest turned cop (Elias Koteas) and a young girl unknowingly carrying the fate of existence within her. The theological stakes are enormous, but Widen’s script often feels more like a term paper on angelology than a streamlined narrative.

What truly elevates the film is its cast. Christopher Walken is electric as Gabriel—quirky, menacing, and strangely funny. His line delivery alone gives the film an off-kilter energy that keeps things lively even when the plot meanders. Meanwhile, Viggo Mortensen steals his few scenes as a soft-spoken, snake-charming Lucifer, oozing charm and threat in equal measure. His entrance, late in the film, is so striking it nearly rewrites the tone altogether.

Despite its rich celestial lore and a few standout moments, The Prophecy is ultimately weighed down by its allegorical excess and patchy pacing. The script sometimes trips over its own gravity, and the visual effects—modest even by 1995 standards—haven’t aged gracefully.

The Prognosis:

Still, there’s a strange allure to Widen’s debut. It’s messy, yes, but it takes big swings. And in the shadow of countless formulaic horror-thrillers of the era, that ambition counts for something. Add in a memorable score, a few genuinely eerie moments, and a cast clearly relishing the material, and The Prophecy remains an imperfect yet intriguing entry in the religious horror canon.

  • Saul Muerte

Dead Wrong: Snatchers Revives The Body Snatcher with Aussie Dark Humour

30 Saturday Aug 2025

Posted by in Movie review, Sydney Underground Film Festival

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , ,

Dark comedy has always thrived on uncomfortable juxtapositions, and Snatchers, the Canberra-made debut from directors Craig Alexander and Shelly Higgs, gleefully leans into the clash between the morbid and the mundane. A contemporary riff on Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Body Snatcher, refracted through the lens of Australian gallows humour, it delivers a brisk, twisty tale of desperation, friendship, and the fine line between survival and exploitation.

The set-up is deceptively simple. In a near-dystopian Australia, lifelong friends Mac (Alexander) and Fettes (Justin Hosking) eke out a living as undervalued, underpaid orderlies. When a Jane Doe rolls into their orbit, seemingly a fresh candidate for organ harvesting, the duo sees an opportunity to cash in on their grim surroundings. But when the corpse proves not to be as dead as expected, their plan mutates into a moral and logistical quagmire — a farcical spiral of bad decisions, shifting allegiances, and grim comedy.

What distinguishes Snatchers is not just its premise, but its tonal balancing act. The film operates as a modern Australian take on the Burke and Hare mythos, where grave-robbing becomes a working-class hustle. Yet, instead of solemn Gothic horror, Alexander and Higgs infuse the narrative with a distinctly local irreverence. The humour is dry, the banter unpolished, and the absurdity of the situation constantly undercut by the casual bluntness of its characters. Where a British version might lean into macabre wit, Snatchers feels bracingly Antipodean — equal parts cheeky, grim, and self-deprecating.

Hannah McKenzie, as the not-so-dead Jane Doe, injects a lively volatility into the proceedings, a reminder that the “corpse” has agency of her own and won’t be easily reduced to commodity. The film finds much of its energy in this disruption, forcing Mac and Fettes to navigate not only their friendship but the moral sinkholes of their scheme. The twists come quickly, some predictable, others slyly surprising, but always tethered to the film’s central question: how far will ordinary people bend ethics when the system leaves them with so little to lose?

Though undeniably modest in scale and budget, Snatchers makes a virtue of its scrappy production. Its humour doesn’t always land cleanly, and its narrative leans into familiar beats, but the sheer audacity of its premise — and the willingness to entwine Stevenson’s gothic lineage with Australian socio-economic bite — keeps it engaging. As a festival entry, it embodies the SUFF spirit: resourceful, transgressive, and proudly unpolished, a film that finds life in the margins where mainstream cinema rarely dares to tread.

The Prognosis:

At 80 minutes, Snatchers doesn’t overstay its welcome. Instead, it lingers in the uneasy laughter it provokes — laughter that’s always one step away from horror, one step away from despair.

  • Saul Muerte

SUFF – Snatchers
Unrated 15+
Starts Thursday, September 11, 2025 · Comedy · 1 hr 20 min

Between Dream and Delirium: Julie Pacino’s I Live Here Now Blurs Reality into Madness

30 Saturday Aug 2025

Posted by in Movie review, Sydney Underground Film Festival

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , ,

Julie Pacino’s debut feature announces itself less as a narrative than as a hypnotic state of being. With I Live Here Now, she crafts a film that drifts between dream, paranoia, and fractured identity, where each scene feels like a step deeper into a psychological labyrinth. It is a strikingly assured first feature, one that refuses to provide a map, demanding instead that its audience surrender to its vertiginous rhythms.

Lucy Fry, in a career-defining performance, embodies Rose, a young actress who retreats to a remote hotel in Idyllwild, California, in search of respite from her unraveling life. But the more she seeks refuge, the more porous the walls of her reality become. Time loops back on itself, doubles materialise, and memory seeps into performance until the categories lose meaning altogether. Fry is magnetic precisely because she grounds this hallucinatory descent in something tangible: the unease of someone who no longer trusts her own perceptions.

Pacino wears her influences with confidence. Sheryl Lee’s presence inevitably conjures the spectre of Twin Peaks, and David Lynch’s fingerprints are felt in the film’s elastic time, uncanny repetitions, and ominous hum that seems to vibrate through the very air. Yet Pacino’s aesthetic is not mere homage. Her saturated colour palette recalls Argento’s lush operatics, while the film’s elliptical logic suggests Buñuel’s surreal provocations. Layered on top is a contemporary awareness of performance itself — how identity, memory, and desire are all rehearsed roles, prone to fracture under pressure.

Shot on 35mm, the film achieves a tactile, dreamlike fragility. Every frame looks like a half-remembered photograph, poised on the edge of fading. The supporting cast — Madeline Brewer, Cara Seymour, Sheryl Lee, and a gleefully slippery Matt Rife — all slot into the hallucinatory mood, each embodying figures that may be confidantes, doubles, or projections of Rose’s disintegrating psyche. The film offers no clear answers; its power lies in its refusal to resolve whether we are witnessing dream, reality, or a fragmented plurality of selves.

If Tokyo Evil Hotel was SUFF’s splatter assault on the senses, then I Live Here Now is its slow, intoxicating hypnosis. It burrows into the subconscious and gnaws away at the seams of certainty, drawing the viewer into a space where dread and desire cohabit uneasily. As Rose descends, so do we — through layers of paranoia and fractured selfhood, into the uncanny realisation that the mind itself is the ultimate haunted house.

The Prognosis:

I Live Here Now is not a film to be solved. It is a film to be inhabited, to be surrendered to. And in that surrender, Julie Pacino has crafted a debut that is both daringly elusive and deeply resonant — a Lynchian dream refracted through her own distinct lens.

  • Saul Muerte

SUFF – I Live Here Now
Unrated 15+
Starts Thursday, September 11, 2025 · Drama · 1 hr 36 min

Spinning Into Madness: Pater Noster and the Mission of Light Turns Vinyl into a Psychedelic Curse

29 Friday Aug 2025

Posted by in Movie review, Sydney Underground Film Festival

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , ,

Christopher Bickel is not a filmmaker interested in polish. He is interested in sweat, noise, and the intoxicating dirt that clings to the celluloid ghosts of exploitation cinema. With Pater Noster and the Mission of Light, his latest DIY descent into the grindhouse abyss, Bickel channels the cracked spirit of 1970s cult horror while infusing it with a distinctly contemporary awareness of obsession — musical, spiritual, and cinematic.

The hook is irresistible: Max, a record store clerk chasing the thrill of rare vinyl, stumbles upon an LP from a long-forgotten commune band called Mission of Light. What begins as crate-digging curiosity spirals into something altogether darker, as Max and her friends trace the record’s origins to a secluded cult whose rituals are soaked in both blood and distortion. Before long, the chiming folk harmonies become incantations, the needle-drop becomes a curse, and the grooves themselves seem to open onto a world of psychedelic terror.

Bickel, whose underground reputation was forged on unapologetically abrasive, micro-budget projects, makes no effort to hide the seams. In fact, the seams are the point: a stitched-together tapestry of lurid colour, stroboscopic editing, and gory practical effects that recall the handmade ferocity of vintage splatter cinema. The budget is meager, but the imagination is unruly. When the film tilts fully into ritual bloodletting and cosmic chaos, it achieves the kind of unhinged sensory overload that expensive horror often can’t touch.

What’s most surprising, though, is the music. The filmmakers wrote and recorded a full album in the guise of Mission of Light, and its jangling, upbeat folk tunes — deceptively sunny, unnervingly catchy — weave through the film like a viral infection. Their recurrence creates a peculiar dissonance: the music seems to gnaw at the edges of the viewer’s mind, becoming both a nostalgic echo of 1970s counterculture and a sinister tool of indoctrination. By the time the cult’s rituals are in full swing, the songs are inseparable from the horror, leaving the audience haunted by melodies as much as imagery.

For all its disjointedness — the pacing takes time to find its grip, and some performances verge on pastiche — the film exerts a strange cumulative power. It sneaks up on you, wearing you down with repetition and atmosphere until its final stretches feel like an outright possession. It is less a film you watch than one you are slowly, insidiously absorbed into.

The Prognosis:

Pater Noster and the Mission of Light is not for everyone. Its rough edges are sharp, its indulgence in retro exploitation tropes unapologetic. But within SUFF’s lineup, it is precisely the kind of discovery audiences come to this festival for: a work made with passion, sweat, and delirious creativity, chewing through its limitations to deliver something singular. Bickel has crafted a nightmare that’s equal parts grindhouse revival, cult exposé, and vinyl collector’s hallucination — a low-budget hymn that worms its way into your soul, humming as it feeds.

  • Saul Muerte

SUFF – Pater Noster and the Mission of Light
Unrated 18+
Starts Thursday, September 11, 2025 · Horror · 1 hr 37 min